U.S. government hacked into French presidential office, spied on senior officials, says a French news report

By Christopher Mims

November 21, 2012

Using the sophisticated Flame malware first developed to spy on and sabotage Iran's nuclear program, U.S. spymasters were able to gain almost unlimited access to the computers of senior French officials in the last days of former president Nicholas Sarkozy's reign, alleges a story in French magazine l'Express.

The impact of this alleged attack is unknown, but experts on the Flame malware -- believed to be the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever developed -- say that compromised computers could have been used to record conversations via infected PCs' microphones. Screenshots may also have been captured, and files could have been copied. According to France's intelligence agency, quoted in the story, the resulting data was then routed through multiple servers on all five continents in order to hide the ultimate destination of the stolen data.