Reply With QuoteOne day its going to be not worth it going online with all the viruses hanging around.
'Flame' cyberespionage worm discovered on thousands of machines across Middle East
Rest at:The UN's International Telecommunications Union and Kaspersky Labs revealed today that it has discovered Flame, a new trojan rivaling Stuxnet. Codenamed "Worm.Win32.Flame," the malware is currently being researched and it is described as "one of the most complex threats ever discovered." It is believed to be active across thousands of computers in the Middle East, primarily in Iran and Israel, as well as on some machines in North Africa.
Researchers believe that the trojan's primary function is cyberespionage: once Flame infects a computer, it is equipped to record audio from connected or built-in microphones, monitor nearby Bluetooth devices, take screenshots, and save data from documents and emails. All of this data, apparently stolen as part of a targeted attack, is constantly sent up to command and control servers.
Flame "has no major similarities with Stuxnet" or its malware family member Duqu, and is believed to be created and controlled by a separate group. The newly-discovered worm does share some aspects with Stuxnet and Duqu, however. Most disappointingly, Flame takes advantage of the same printer spooling hole and autorun.inf infection methods exploited by Stuxnet. According to Kaspersky Lab's reports, it's believed that Flame achieves its initial infection from users who are victims of phishing attacks, and then once it has made it onto a computer it can be spread over local area networks or via USB flash drives with other machines. The bad news is that it's confirmed that the worm has spread over local area networks to fully-patched Windows 7 systems, but the good news is that you shouldn't have to worry about Flame breaking into your PC in its current form. As a cyberespionage tool, the trojan has been seen targeting some individuals, but also education and government organizations mainly in the Middle East. Additionally, the research says that the worm surveys a system and will then uninstall itself from machines it thinks are not interesting.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/28/30...y-lab-detailed
Seems an oddly specific piece of code to be some hotrodder's work, especially given the area it's apparently limited to...
One day its going to be not worth it going online with all the viruses hanging around.
If viruses didn't stop people from banging hookers, it sure isn't going to stop people from going online.Originally Posted by IconOfEvi
Good point.
I'm still trying to get my head around cyberwarfare.
Stuxnet, what little I actually understand of it, on a scale of 1-10 for cyberwarfare as we common folk think of viruses affected our PCs and Macs was about a 500,0000.
It used a good number of zero day vulnerability trump cards that are largely one time only and extremely, extremely valuable crown jewels of any cyberwarfare arsenal.
Cyberwarfare sounds like about a jillion concurrently running poker games where you only have so many trump cards to play and try to win every hand...IF every hand gets played.
I'm guessing this stuff is as carefully secured as the highest level HUMINT sources...which means we are unlikely to read about ANY of it, unless some muppet leaks it, it's used, or it's the year 2112.
This internet stuff is both an intelligence officer's wet dream and a counter intelligence officer's worst nightmare.
You need access to the source code of Siemens, Microsoft and other manufacturers and even be one of the senior developers of these operating systems in order to run these worms undetected for so many years.
Whoever is doing it has access to these R&D centers.
I wonder if this stuff would have anything to do with all those anti-monopoly lawsuits against Microsoft they were dealing with a LONG time ago....that just kind of evaporated in some places.
Companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Google, and Facebook provide fantastic opportunities to develop intelligence.
I could imagine some strategic partnering going on.
Same with China and Huawei......and how China has avoided Microsoft and other US products for their secure or secure-ish computing needs.
Plus there's all those hundreds of companies out there making internet enabled hardware, software, firmware.
Tehran admits being targeted by what could be most sophisticated malware yet; says 'massive amounts of data lost.' Computer experts say such complex virus takes national resources to develop
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...235231,00.html
The PLC's in SCADA systems are very rarely encrypted and the codes are not as complex. Its only after the stuxnet attack that many corporations have started giving encrypted SCADA a thought. However, the worm has to be smart enough to realise it is in the right plant (say Iran's nuclear plant) to unleash its bag of tricks. How it does that (maybe by sniffing out a particular combination of connected equipment to the SCADA network) is still a mystery.
It only takes Israel to hit "Donkey sex " porn sites in Middle east, to see the true meaning of outrage and jihad.
Some Kaspersky guy thinks there are more similar, unknown operations going on out there.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/34...pon-middle.htm
Just another zionist plot to overthrow peaceful and democratic governments of the Middle East.
This is awesome. It's like a cross between the dog ate my home and it's the CIAs/Mossad's/South African Security Force's fault.
Now if I'm late responding to an email I can blame CIA/Mossad too.
Either that or you need people that both do reserve duty in the military and at the same time work for Microsoft, Cisco, Siemens, etc... as software architects.
As for Huawei, most of the R&D is done in Israel by Toga networks, they employ mostly System Architects with 10+ years of experience in that particular job and pay them double than any US/Israeli company+signing grants of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They are always hiring
http://www.toganetworks.com/Career.html
Interesting.......I think I read that in Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia...one of the Baltic States anyway...the one that dove head first into the internet deep end nationwide....
I read they have an official internet militia for lack of a better word....a decent sized group of citizens who work in IT across the spectrum who all have a part-time job working for government defending the nation's IT infrastructure.
It's one responsibility where part-time soldiers might provide potentially far more benefits to the country than full-timers.
If you seek an example: Adi Shamir who is one of the founders of RSA (nowadays under EMC) was a reservist in the IDF. Apart of the knowledge in order to store and analyze vast amount of data you need computing power that not many militaries have.
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