washington its no secret that the united states believes in and has been spying on adversaries and allies alike through means human and technical but what the most recent disclosure by the cybersecurity firm kaspersky lab reveals is the penetration and complexity of the espionage using breakthrough methods that victim countries find it hard to shake off in a report published on monday and presented at a conference in mexico kaspersky lab which is a russian firm said a us cyberespionage unit called the equation group embedded surveillance tools on the hard drives produced by a number of wellknown manufacturers including western digital seagate samsung hitachi and toshiba which are bought by countries corporations military and research institutions in countries across the world targets of the equation group the firm said were observed in more than 30 countries including us adversaries such as russia china and iran and troubled and failing countries such as pakistan afghanistan iraq yemen and somalia but they also included us allies and friends such as the united kingdom germany france singapore mexico brazil and india the group said it detected particularly high infection rates in computers in iran and pakistan whose nuclear programs the us is said to monitor most closely the new technology involves burrowing malware deep in the computer systems so as to enable it to infect the firmware the embedded software that boots up the computers hardware before the operating system starts the malware kaspersky says is almost impossible to get rid off even after disk reformatting and reinstalling the operating system current antivirus products and most security protocols are also incapable of removing the malware the infiltrated tools are also designed to run on computers that are disconnected from the internet infiltrating the firmware the closest one can get to the hardware of the machine has long been the holy grail of cyberwarriors cyberspies and cybercriminals alike because software security has improved significantly over the years and systems are now relatively well protected wikileaks expose had already revealed us programs to install specialized hardware on computers being shipped to target countries that hardware according to the new york times can then receive lowfrequency radio waves broadcast from a suitcasesize device that deployed by us intelligence around the world