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Mysterious hacking group Careto was run by the Spanish government, sources say


The elusive hacking group Careto was never publicly linked to a specific government, but TechCrunch has learned researchers concluded privately that the Spanish government was behind the group.

Eventually the researchers were able to attribute the network activity to a mysterious — and at the time completely unknown — Spanish-speaking hacking group that they called Careto, after the Spanish slang word (“ugly face” or “mask” in English), which they found buried within the malware’s code. When Kaspersky first revealed the existence of Careto in 2014, its researchers called the group “one of the most advanced threats at the moment,” with its stealthy malware capable of stealing highly sensitive data, including private conversations and keystrokes from the computers it compromised, much akin to . In one of the hacked machines the researchers analyzed, Kaspersky found that Careto’s malware could surreptitiously switch on the computer’s microphone (while hiding the Windows icon that normally alerts the user that the mic is on), steal files, such as personal documents, session cookies that can allow access to accounts without needing a password, web browsing histories from several browsers, and more.

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