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Trojan Built for Industrial Espionage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the cloak-dagger-and-the-almighty-buck dept.

xPertCodert writes "Some of the largest Israeli companies are involved in the major industral espionage case, in which private investigators implanted specially crafted Trojan horses on the computers at unsuspecting companies in a bid to obtain priviledged financial and technical data. Given the current state of Windows security and advances in spyware, probably any company has become a very easy target for such spy attack from competitors"

4 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Ethics & Business by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Did any of their officers graduate from Stanford or Harvard Business School?

    1. Re:Ethics & Business by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices

  2. Most trojans are spread via unpatch Outlook. by khasim · · Score: 4, Funny
    Send 90% of the CEOs out there an email that says 'click here for a free iPod!' and we all know what they're going to do, whether they run Windows, Linux, or OS X.

    Yep. But there are ways to reduce the potential there.

    #1. The email client should NOT under ANY circumstances automatically run scripts or executables. This was a MAJOR problem with previous versions of Outlook.

    #2. The regular user should NOT under ANY circumstances be able to run a program from his user directory/temp directory.

    Now, since Linux does not have any equivalent to Outlook in example #1, that means that Linux machines are far more difficult to infect. But not impossible.

    Once you've implemented example #2, then the ONLY way for a trojan to get onto a system is if the user has the root password AND goes through the regular install process.

    Now, each step that the user must perform is another chance for the trojan to fail.

    If, on Linux, the end user has to go through half a dozen steps or so, then Linux is going be resistant to all but the most dedicated of idiots.

    And remember, the infection rate has to be higher than the removal rate otherwise the trojan dies, like any virus or worm would.

    Linux can be less than 100% perfectly secure, yet still have no live trojans, viruses or worms in the wild.
  3. Re:Opensource trojans? by greenrd · · Score: 2, Funny
    It occurs to me that the best language in which to do that kind of attack would be Perl. Great plausible deniability.

    "Why's that Perl code so obfuscated?"

    "Oh, that's just a Perl geek showing off - you'll get used to it."

    --
    Female Prison Rape in NY