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Flame: The Massive Stuxnet-Level Malware Sweeping the Middle East
An anonymous reader writes "Wired is reporting on a massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation. Kaspersky Lab, the company that discovered the malware, has a FAQ with more details."
Is it coincidence that a Russian security firm keeps finding these clandestine state-sponsored Middle-eastern directed malware? Or are US and European security firms simply instructed to look the other way? /tinfoilhat
It seems those kinds of viruses are going against the trends, which is using social engineering nowadays, and not very sophisticated software. For example, the oh-so-dangerous Chinese hackers mostly use tactics which boil down to sending emails asking you in clever ways to execute the attached exe or to enter your username and password on their website that looks like your legitimate one.
It's refreshing to see a virus which targets, you know, the actual computer instead of the user.
Wikipedia links to this PDF: http://www.crysys.hu/skywiper/skywiper.pdf
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/256370/researchers_identify_stuxnetlike_cyberespionage_malware_called_flame.html
TFA purports that somebody wrote a bunch of code that is a virus, trojan, malware and toaster driver all at once. Nobody knows who did it or why, but they must be very smart. It hijacks data, voice, video and neural transmissions and appears to be able to perform telekinesis. It was likely written sometime after 1996 and before 2021.
It's big.. Really big. So big that it would fit on any USB drive or email attachment created since, well, 1996.
It's smart. Really smart. So smart that it's going to take us literally months of press reports to get it out.
It goes after the Usual Suspects. It may or may not be related to Stuxnet, tilde, Steven P. Jobs or George Bush (either or both of them).
For some strange reason, the coders wrote the thing pretty much unobfuscated. Except that unobfuscated isn't a word.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
First we got the bomb, and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side (I believe).
China got the bomb, but have no fears,
They can't wipe us out for at least five years.
Who's next?
-- Tom Lerher "Who's Next"
Yes it is clearly not in the best interest of the intelligence community to be discovered with whatever plot they're currently plotting away at. On the other hand Kaspersky wants profit, being the first to report on something like this will likely gain them space in the spotlight for the moment at least which translates to profit, so it is probably not in the best interest of Kaspersky to comply with the intelligence community's need for obscurity unless they pay them enough enough(or use some less pleasant means of coercion).
Who made Flame?
Flame seems to use libraries with permissive licenses only. No hacktivists or cybercriminals would care about this issue, they would use whatever works best.
This leaves governments, they might. Why? Because if it ever becomes known who actually made it, that party would need to release all of the sources, had they used libraries under some copyleft license! Why? Well, whoever made Flame has already obviously distributed binaries, so suing for copyleft violation would happen in court, and it would be many people suing, especially the counterparty is the government. It would be a PR disaster, and to risk that on an election year? No way.
Also, Flame requires a considerable infrastructure to store and analyze the spied information. Which governments would be capable of pulling this off? All the big ones with a lot of money to spend: China, Russia, Great Britain, France, USA, Japan, ...
So, which government cares a lot about intellectual property? China? Nope. Russia? Nope. Great Britain - well, yeah. Personally, I don't think it was Great Britain. It would be enlightening to check the Flame Lua-parts (or other plaintext in the main Flame) for spelling of -ise vs. -ize. I bet there's -ize and not -ise.
It is said that Stuxnet and Flame share similar 0-day holes. The nation which developed Stuxnet is Israel and they have a strong history of military and intelligence collaboration with USA. Israel would not have had the capability or capacity to run two such parallel programs on its own.
So who HAS likely NOT made Flame? Drop the nations which are one way or another unlikely candidates, and only one name is really left.
So, who made Flame?
USA made Flame. This is what I think. What's your analysis?
Um, wrong. Where did you get the idea that the US views malware-based foreign espionage as an act of war?
So if important US systems were infested with Iranian-government malware, Congress wouldn't be demanding that Obama bomb Iran this afternoon?
Important US government systems ARE being continuously attacked by Chinese-government actors, and Congress is NOT demanding that Obama bomb China. I don't think the result would be any different if it were Iran doing it (and they're probably trying). "Cyber-warfare" is not real war, and in practice it does not provoke a military response these days. It's happening all the time.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Yeah, just like all the spying and such that went on between the US and Soviet Union - everytime someone was caught it ended up in a new world war.
Oh wait no it didn't. Just because the tools changed doesn't mean much else has. This sort of thing has gone on as long as nations have existed (if not longer), and will go on. If any of this is new or exciting for you, you need to get out more.
Enemy nations spy on each other. Friendly nations spy on each other. It's what nations do. It's not a "ZOMG this proves (nation I hate) is evil!" material.
TFA purports that somebody wrote a bunch of code that is a virus, trojan, malware and toaster driver all at once.
You mean it's like a Facebook phone?
Apart from the toaster bit, which might be useful...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Well, hard to say if it's realy a weapon, but if so I also approve.
Think about it: this may well be a war, an agreessive confilct between twonations, one of which has nuclear weapons, and the other is close. And how many casualties so far? How many cities levelled? This is a good weapon, as weapons go!
Sure, eventually we'll be attacked by the same, and there will be casualties, but it somehow seems less dangerous to civilians than dropping skyscrapers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Kaspersky discovered the malware about two weeks ago after the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union asked the Lab to look into reports in April that computers belonging to the Iranian Oil Ministry and the Iranian National Oil Company had been hit with malware that was stealing and deleting information from the systems.
Why do you jump to the conclusion that if it is targeting Iran it must be a good thing? Do you ever question what you see in the media? What if it was written by programmers hired by wall streeters that were trying to gain an upper hand on the oil market, thereby basically stealing money from the Iranians and from you? Still a good thing? This is probably not the case, but that's just it: until we find out all of the details we need to keep our minds open and quizzical, and question who is feeding us what bullshit and why.
Propaganda is getting more and more sophisticated; it is coming at you from all directions. I'm not saying be paranoid, just to realize that most media that gets presented to you has a purpose. Once in a while see if you can divine that purpose.
Try some critical thinking.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
1. a scarier version of stuxnet
2. a Facebook smarphone
3. secret backdoors on military chips
4. workplace havoc because of OS fake holidays
I was going to accuse Slashdot of fearmongering, until I doublechecked and found out that, yes, Facebook really is trying to build a smartphone.
The Apocalypse is near.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The story also states:
its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals â" marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.
What I don't understand is why a massive and technically complex piece of malware necessarily has to be written by a "nation-state"? There are no really smart hackers around that might want to do something like this for the challenge? One might think that a smart hacker might want to point the smoking gun in a different direction?
Explain, please.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think it is both a matter of money and resources. A "nation-state" has as much money as anyone can, and they also can place moles/agents in a lot of places where your average, even "smart", hacker would shit his pants. Not only that, a lone man can only do so much
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Wait.
Do you seriously believe Iran will eventually attack the USA?
For real? Do you think Khamenei will, someday, wake up, drink his coffee and say "What a nice day! I'll deploy the long-range missile technology I don't have to blow up a location half the planet away from me, just because Rush Limbaugh said I probably would do it."?
And what do you think are you going to bomb in China, exactly? Your own company's factories? "God damn it, stop hacking us or we'll bomb our own ipad factory!" Yeah, the Chinese are fucking scared...
Actually it's funny this is right out of Marxist philosophy which says whoever controls the means of the production are the rulers of that society. Well, over the last 20 years China has pulled in all of the world production so guess what that means? Haha, the Chinese are pretty crafty. If only Americans had read Marx instead of burning it they might have seen it coming.
Since Iran support/sponsors terrorists and has enough nuclear material to make an estimated five nuclear weapons (although the material may be slightly too crude to weaponize at the moment),
I'd bet the malware was developed either in Israel or the USA...probably Israel with USA support. This could create problems but I think this is a good move.
I think you should work on your premise there. I don't know which terrorists you speak of. The US and Isreal support terrorists ("freedom fighters") when it is in their interest. Both have large amounts of nuclear weapons. Aren't you applying double standards here? How do you know Iran are the evil guys here (just because they are being portrayed as such in the media)? Iranian leadership is whacky, but it isn't warmongering.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
the important somewhat scary question: how does Kaspersky accumulate so much sensitive data?
Think about it. We're talking about personal computers in the middle east. We're talking about some kind of top-shelf spyware. So where does Kaspersky pull their data from?
I think cyberweapons could be seen as useful to computer defense companies. Since I can remember, programmers interested in viruses and virus defense have been apt to bring up the question, "why shouldn't we infect everybody's computer with the latest virus scanner in the form of a virus? Why leave it this voluntary thing?"
Obivously Kaspersky and any other computer virus defense company could benefit from spreading a virus that allows them to actively scan the contents of a computer's drive or memory, if they are looking across a huge geography for a specific signature. They could benefit even more if the virus allowed them to attach modules that will tell them if the cyberweapon attempts to contact other computers either to spread or to report back, because this would allow them to quickly and easily build a vector map.
Which leads me to ask how they get their data in the first place. It's not like they are paying off all the Geek Squads in the Middle East, to send them copies of the entire contents of any drives brought in as having "problems". So how are they discovering threats in the first place, and how can they write paragraphs such as this one:
"According to our observations, the operators of Flame artificially support the quantity of infected systems on a certain constant level. This can be compared with a sequential processing of fields â" they infect several dozen, then conduct analysis of the data of the victim, uninstall Flame from the systems that arenâ(TM)t interesting, leaving the most important ones in place. After which they start a new series of infections."
This suggests that they have become intimately knowledgable about the owners of the infected machines, whether or not those owners are persons of interest, and know seemingly just about as much as the owners of the cyberweapon know. So where is the line drawn, to distinguish between threat and defense??
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
In the case of Stuxnet, your average hacker doesn't have access to nuclear centrifuge controllers to develop and debug on. For code that is as finely tuned as it was, you need a development lab that includes the target systems or at least true simulations thereof.
For something like Flame, with it being as targeted as it is, you'd expect something similar.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Assuming you're talking about Linus and Linux, he had a LITTLE bit of help along the way.
Napoleon didn't almost subjugate anything without the resources of one of the world's most powerful nation states.
Larry Wall also had quite a bit of help from others making Perl what it is today.
Nice job picking examples that make the GPs point though.