Nation State Spying Malware Revealed

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
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Symantec announced the company has found a new and very complicated malware that operates in five stages. It is so sophisticated that the back-door Trojan has been in use since 2008 without detection.

The level of quality and the amount of effort put into keeping it secret convinces Symantec that it is a primary cyberespionage tool of a nation state.
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My brother had that on his PC, had to run FreeSpywareSweeper 3 times to get rid of it
 
SonicTron said:
6 years to discover it

Makes me think antivirus software is completely useless
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Actually, it is quite easy to write "malware" that will never be detected by scanners provided that the scanner companies never get a copy of it.

The way scanners work is that they look for specific patterns which identifies known viruses/malware.

If it isn't known or a similar variant of a known virus/malware, it will never be detected.
 
Nation states, spying to protect themselves under the guise of protecting their citizens. Always have, always will, the temptation is just too great.
 
SonicTron said:
6 years to discover it

Makes me think antivirus software is completely useless
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Not quite - the article notes the 2.0 version of it appeared "in 2013", and by December of 2013 Symantec had detected and was providing protection against the 'backdoor component' of it used to deliver the payload.

They just didn't know until recently what exactly it was that they had detected and blocked, and didn't actually know what the potential 'payloads' delivered might be. Nor, notably, that it was part of a 2- or 3- stage infection of a complexity that would point to a nation-state.

But the core vulnerability was being blocked.
 
McFry said:
No Chinese or US infected systems?
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I wondered about that myself. At first look you'd think that means one of the two is responsible, but the US and China are pretty polar to one another, you'd think if one was guilty then the other would be the culprit. I check things like natural gas pipelines, oil exporters, importers, uranium producing nations, and I got tired. the only thing I located in my crude search is that when I looked up a list of the top ten most friendly countries to Israel non of them countries were on this list.
 
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