by veen

The confirmation came in the form of Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn “cookies,” tiny unique files that are automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people browsing the Internet, often for advertising purposes. GCHQ maintains a huge repository named MUTANT BROTH that stores billions of these intercepted cookies, which it uses to correlate with IP addresses to determine the identity of a person. GCHQ refers to cookies internally as “target detection identifiers.”

The experts from Fox IT and military intelligence worked to dissect the malware on Belgacom’s systems, and were shocked by what they found. In interviews with The Intercept and its reporting partners, sources familiar with the investigation described the malware as the most advanced they had ever seen, and said that if the email exchange server had not malfunctioned in the first place, the spy bug would likely have remained inside Belgacom for several more years.