Slashdot Mirror
'Old School' Hackers Attack European Governments Using 'MiniDuke' Malware
puddingebola writes "The Guardian reports that hackers have been targeting officials from over 20 European governments with a new piece of malware called 'MiniDuke.' 'The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which discovered MiniDuke, said the attackers had servers based in Panama and Turkey – but an examination of the code revealed no further clues about its origin (PDF). Goverments targeted include those of Ireland, Romania, Portugal, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The malware also compromised the computers of a prominent research foundation in Hungary, two thinktanks, and an unnamed healthcare provider in the US.' Eugene Kaspersky says it's an unusual piece of malware because it's reminiscent of attacks from two decades ago. 'I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world.' The computers were corrupted through an Adobe PDF attachment to an email."
Anyone else weary to click the attached PDF?
From Hell's retirement home I stab at thee!" Why do I get this picture of some hackers with walkers and false teeth striking out with a couple of old 8088s from their group home?
These days, who gets excited over pictures of Anna Kournikova?
"The computers were corrupted through an Adobe PDF attachment to an email." Links to a PDF describing the attack.
mac: "The pdf was corrupted and could not be opened. Try downloading again."
mac: "The pdf was corrupted and could not be opened, open in raw text view?"
windows: "This document requires age verification to view. Please verify your internet connection and enter a valid credit card number to proceed."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I remember several years back using a flash tool that allowed reading/writing of arbitrary files on the system, back in Flash3-5 IIRC... Our use was not malicious, and it was before Flash had offline data available... we were only using it to store the active simulation/test being taken, but at that time I disabled flash on every machine outside of work I had access to. Was a colossal security hole.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
They would have been protected if they had been using Chromebooks.
Within the next 5 years, probably 75% of the world will move to this safer platform and finally most hacks will be gone.
Only power users will still be using full-on PCs.
Eugene Kaspersky says it's an unusual piece of malware because it's reminiscent of attacks from two decades ago. 'I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.
Unless I've been asleep for a very long time, the late 90s/early 00s is one decade ago.