The Austrian government said on Friday it verified reports that software from an IT company based on its soil was used to target law firms, consultancies and banks in at least three countries. The software called Subzero, developed by the Viennese company DSIRF, would have had access to “confidential information such as passwords or login credentials,” Microsoft said in a blog post on Wednesday.
According to their elements, it was deployed several times in 2021 and 2022, with the aim of accessing personal data in the professional context: “The victims identified to date include legal firms, banks and strategic companies of council in countries such as Austria, the United Kingdom and Panama,” they write.
The DSIRF company does not acknowledge the facts
The Austrian Interior Ministry said it “is unable to confirm such incidents”. The intelligence agency DSN “verifies the accusations. At this stage, there is no evidence of the use of spyware by the company in question,” according to a statement sent to AFP.
In comments reported by the Kurier newspaper, the DSIRF company claims that Subzero, which is not available on the market, has not been used for malicious purposes and “was developed exclusively for the needs of the authorities of countries of the European Union “. The Austrian ministry denied “any business relationship” with DSIRF.
Like Pegasus tunes
This case comes a year after the Pegasus scandal: an international media collective then revealed that this software, designed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, had made it possible to spy on the numbers of hundreds of journalists, politicians, activists or business leaders. companies from different countries. NSO, regularly accused of playing into the hands of authoritarian regimes, had assured that its software was only used to obtain information against criminal or terrorist networks.