Behind The Huge Cyberattack Campaign Against Latin American Governments

Since 2010, a secret cyber-attack campaign, possibly state-sponsored, has been directed at several Latin American intelligence services, military, embassies and other government institutions.

The Moscow-based cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab, which claims to have unearthed the campaign, has given it a name: El Machete. Most of the attacks’ victims are located in countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and Spain.

The malware that El Machete contains is capable of logging keystrokes; capturing audio from the computer’s microphone; capturing screenshots and geolocation data; taking photos from the computer’s web camera; copying files to a remote server or special USB device; and hijacking the clipboard and capturing information from the target machine.