Russia Allegedly Gave Malware-Laden Swag to G20 Delegates

After learning that the US government spies on many of its allies, a new tale has been written in the cloak-and-dagger annals of geopolitics. This time, it involves Russia. And swag.

According to a pair of Italian newspapers, Russian officials handed out gift bags to delegates at the G20 summit earlier this year. Gift giving is part of geopolitical business, and we all know that you can't go to a conference—even a global summit—without getting free stuff. But these swag bags were different: they featured USB drives and phone chargers, and naturally those thumb drives were laden with malware.

La Stampa reports that after returning Brussels from the September summit in St. Petersburg, European Council President Herman van Rompuy reported his suspicious thumb drive and a cellphone charger—both emblazoned with the Russian G20 logo—to German authorities. (La Stampa's Google-translated headline reads "The poisoned chalice of Putin USB stick bugs," which I feel suggests just how salacious the story is.)

Il Corriere della Sera corroborates the story. It writes that the German secret service investigation sparked by van Rompuy's inquiry found that "the USB stick and power cables are suitable for the illegal collection of data [from] computers and cell phones," according to a memo allegedly circulated to G20 member states by van Rompuy.

It's unclear what, if anything, was gleaned from the effort. An unnamed diplomat from the EU who spoke with the Telegraph laughed the alleged subterfuge off, saying it would be a "schoolboy error" to actually use a free USB stick handed out at such an event. Just about anyone with a modicum of knowledge about computer security would have to agree, but it's also not hard to imagine some diplomat somewhere gleefully jamming his free G20 thumb drive into his laptop while snickering at all the plebes in Starbucks who didn't get computer gear at an international economic conference.

The European Commission's official spokesman denied that anything was wrong with electronic devices handed out at the event. Russia also denied the allegations, and a spokesman said the charges were likely trumped up just to distract the world from the NSA.

"It is definitely nothing other than an attempt to switch attention from the problems that really exist, which dominate the agenda between the European capitals and Washington, to problems that are ephemeral and nonexistent," Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said.

That denial does add a delicious bit of conspiracy to the whole fiasco, as strange as it would be for Italian newspapers to run cover for the US. Considering that world governments have been spying on each other for pretty much all of recorded history, it does seem a bit strange that Russia would try to pull such an obvious trick as loading USB drives with malware. Still, as far as espionage goes, you only get in trouble if someone can prove it.