'Madi' Cyber Espionage Malware Hits Middle East Targets

DavidGilbert99 writes "Following the discovery of the highly-complex Flame virus in May, two security companies (Seculert and Kaspersky Lab) have uncovered a new cyber-espionage threat against the Middle East. Madi, or Madhi, is an information-stealing trojan which is technically a lot simpler than Flame or Stuxnet but is specifically targeting people in critical infrastructure companies, financial services and government embassies, which are mainly located in Iran, Israel and Afghanistan. The Madi creators use social engineering techniques to spread, embedding the malware in various documents including text files and PowerPoint presentations. It is unclear if the malware is state-sponsored or not, but it has already stolen several gigabytes of information and is still active."

Comments

Re:Text files? Go on....

[Baloroth]

It's possible they mean files that appear as text to the user. Ars Technica mentions they use "Right to Left Override" to make it look like executable files aren't (they might show up as a .jpg, for example, complete with a jpg icon) to the end user. If the creators are clever, they could even have it launch the appropriate viewer to make it look like they opened the kind of file they did. So it isn't hard to imagine they did the same with .txt files, although given the context with "PowerPoint" they probably did mean .doc files or the like.

Re:MAH-DI!!

[scorp1us]

Mahdi - redeemer of Islam.

News article spelling the name wrong :-)

[billstewart]

They probably got it wrong because of translating from Russian and back, but it's "Mahdi" in the source code and the file directory shown in the article. Also, that's the standard English-language spelling for the Mahdi, who's approximately the Muslim version of the Messiah (depending on which branch of Islam you're talking to - it comes from hadiths and tradition rather than directly from the Quran.) So it's kind of an arrogant thing to name your program - does that mean it was really done by the Israelis, or by some Arab haxx0r-k1dd13?