NSA Monitors Corporate Communications Worldwide - Canadian Media

Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail said the US National Security Agency (NSA) spies on the communications traffic of companies from all over the world.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been tracking the communications traffic of companies all over the world, Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper reported Tuesday citing a leaked classified document.

The document, a presentation titled "Private Networks: Analysis, Contextualization and Setting the Vision," was exposed by the NSA's ex-contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

The presentation includes the names of 15 entities, including ones based in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The list only includes companies with names that start with the letter "R" and involves firms from the communication, energy, finance and banking sectors.

The Canadian entities from the list told the Globe and Mail that their communications traffic was secure as well as internal data, and there were no grounds to suspect they had been exposed to monitoring.

The presentation did not reveal the NSA's aims or results of the tracking. The newspaper suggested that the trafficking might be an attempt to take advantage of corporate networks in order to use them later.

The document's marking shows the NSA handed it over to the Communications Security Establishment, Canada's cryptologic agency, the newspaper said.

In February, the Russia-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab said it had located spyware installed in computers in key governmental, research and other institutions of some 30 nations, including Russia and Iran.

The company did not identify any country as being behind the program, but found similarities to Stuxnet, a worm, allegedly used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to infiltrate Iranian nuclear reactor systems in 2010.