Syrian Government Uses Skype To Push Malware To Activists

judgecorp writes "The Syrian government is using Skype as a channel to infect activists' systems with malware, installing Trojans and backdoors, according to security firm F-Secure. The evidence comes from a hard drive sent for analysis. 'The activist's system had become infected as a result of a Skype chat. The chat request came from a fellow activist. The problem was that the fellow activist had already been arrested and could not have started the chat. Initial infection occurred when the activist accepted a file called MACAddressChanger.exe over the chat. This utility was supposed to change the hardware MAC address of the system in order to bypass some monitoring tools. Instead, it dropped a file called silvia.exe which was a backdoor — a backdoor called "Xtreme RAT." Xtreme Rat is a full-blown malicious Remote Access Tool.'"

Comments

are people really this stupid

[alen]

it's 2012, don't accept any file from anyone unless the name and file type looks halfway legit and you can trust the person 100%

this is why the syrian army is dumping dead bodies in a river. the people are too dumb to exercise security

someone ask the greeks to teach them a lesson in security while revolting against an oppressive government