“We can now be clear that there has been spyware in our phones,” the ministry’s head of information security, Matti Parviainen, told AFP. The infected mobile devices were used by Finnish diplomats posted overseas, although the ministry refused to comment on how many staff were targeted, nor on whether the identity of the cyberattackers is known.
“We have good guesses” about how long the diplomats were spied on, Parviainen said, but the espionage is no longer continuing. Diplomats’ phones only handle information that is either public or with the lowest security classification, the ministry said, but added “the information and its source may be confidential between diplomats.”
