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AutoCAD Worm Medre.A Stealing Designs, Blueprints
Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threat Post: "Security researchers have come across a worm that is meant specifically to steal blueprints, design documents and other files created with the AutoCAD software. The worm, known as ACAD/Medre.A, is spreading through infected AutoCAD templates and is sending tens of thousands of stolen documents to email addresses in China. However, experts say that the worm's infection rates are dropping at this point and it doesn't seem to be part of a targeted attack campaign. ... [They] discovered that not only was the worm highly customized and well-constructed, it seemed to be targeting mostly machines in Peru for some reason. ... They found that ACAD/Medre.A was written in AutoLISP, a specialized version of the LISP scripting language that's used in AutoCAD."
Because it's written in LISP.
also most Autodesk software needs local admin to run right or at least the older ver of it did.
It's just sharing. Information wants to be free! Remember?
That it's finally expanded into the virus industry!
Why else would they take their designs?
It makes cloning villages much eaier if you have the blue-prints.
I bet these guys http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/06/22/0022251/china-pirates-austrian-village would have loved the blue-prints before they started
. .
Just arrest all LISP programmers and beat them up until they talk. There aren't many anyways.
use the email addresses to send flawed data to china so they end up trying to build impossible things like what is found in Escher's drawings
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
A brand new install of Autocad costs $3,995 and up. It produces files that have a distinctive extension, making them easy to identify and to tell from other types of documents without even having to examine internal code. Any file produced by a legal autocad install was made by somebody who paid serious money to be able to do so. Ergo, if someone can harvest a thousand Autocad files at random, a high proportion of them will be of valuable, useful stuff.
Fighting warez sites distributing Autocad means, if the company is successful, a higher percentage of the documents made with it will be the valuable stuff. At 4K a legitimate copy, actually stopping a high percentage of 'pirates' means increasing the danger to your own legitimate users.
If going through 10,000 autocad documents means finding, say, a dozen new patent filings and diagrams, two trade secret process designs for million dollar product lines, a few archetectural blueprint packages, and such, it becomes worth a government paying a programming team to write the software and putting three or four fulltime engineers and a few technicians on just evaluating those documents for the 'good' ones. If there were a thousand bootleg copies of the software for every legitimate one, that government might not bother to go through 10 million documents for about the same haul, as most of the bootleg copies won't be producing anything worth that much.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm going to ball CS, I install Autocad for many of my customer's users, and I haven't needed to give them admin privileges since version 2007 I think.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
But then they will be building the impossible while we only build the possible. They will have assumed that we have working Poiuyts and attempt to build them themselves, not knowing that they don't work. The biggest problem in not getting something done is assuming it can't be done. The Chinese will assume it can be done, and do it.
We will then be having generals and captains of industry bemoaning the Poiuyt Gap, which must be closed and we will spend trillions building Poiuyts.
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BMO - What, me worry?
auto cad needs a better then video card what most vm have. Also can use a lot of cpu power.
what the chinese will mostly get is many, many house floorplans, elevations and relfected ceiling plans
If it can steal blueprints, that is one sophisticated piece of software. It would have to fold them, stuff and seal envelopes, calculate and affix postage and deposit them in the outgoing mail. Wow!
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Hello,
Somewhat surprised to see that the original research on the worm by ESET has not been mentioned yet on Slashdot. For all those who are interested, here it is:
From speaking with some of the ESET folks involved in the above, it seems there may be additional details forthcoming.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
also most Autodesk software needs local admin to run right or at least the older ver of it did.
AutoCAD 2013 (and 2012, and at least a few more versions back) run fine without admin rights. It helps to have write permissions opened up on various AutoCad folders (Program Files\AutoDesk, ProgramData\Autodesk, etc.) to allow for customization, but the application will run fine. Admin rights are only needed at the time of initial installation.