New Leaks Suggest NSA Successfully Targeted Anti-Virus Software

The National Security Agency successfully hacked into popular anti-virus software to track users and gain access to computer networks, according to new leaked documents.

The documents leaked Monday by whistle-blower Edward Snowden said that NSA, along with its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), spent years reverse-engineering popular computer security software in order to spy on email and other electronic communications, according to the classified documents published by the online news site The Intercept.

Both of the agencies targeted the software produced by Moscow-based company Kaspersky Lab which has more than 270,000 corporate clients and more than 400 million users worldwide.

The leaked documents include a warrant renewal request filed by the GCHQ in 2008 that claimed Kaspersky's products interfered with its spying operations.

"Personal security products such as the Russian anti-virus software Kaspersky continue to pose a challenge to GCHQ's CNE [Computer Network Exploitation] capability and SRE [software reverse-engineering] is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and to prevent detection of our activities," the warrant renewal request reads. "Examination of Kaspersky and other such products continues."

In the GCHQ, the NSA admitted that reverse engineering was of questionable legality. It also noted that in other cases it would amount to copyright infringement.

The leak further warns that NSA would monitor email accounts attached to companies producing security software.