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Highly Advanced Backdoor Trojan Cased High-Profile Targets For Years

Posted by samzenpus on from the protect-ya-neck dept.

An anonymous reader points out this story at Ars about a new trojan on the scene. Researchers have unearthed highly advanced malware they believe was developed by a wealthy nation-state to spy on a wide range of international targets in diverse industries, including hospitality, energy, airline, and research. Backdoor Regin, as researchers at security firm Symantec are referring to the trojan, bears some resemblance to previously discovered state-sponsored malware, including the espionage trojans known as Flame and Duqu, as well as Stuxnet, the computer worm and trojan that was programmed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. Regin likely required months or years to be completed and contains dozens of individual modules that allowed its operators to tailor the malware to individual targets.

4 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft Windows only by innocent_white_lamb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This apparently only runs on Windows.

    I really don't understand why people run sensitive and critical stuff on Microsoft Windows. (I'm not trying to be a troll.) It's the world's biggest target for malware, it's a monoculture, and it has a security model that tends toward convenience over security, and was actually bolted on after-the-fact.

    Unix (Linux) is about as far from a monoculture as you can get while still remaining reasonably compatible between distributions, and it was built with security in mind.

    --
    If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
    1. Re:Microsoft Windows only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      targeted attacks like this are OS agnostic, if the organisations they wanted to hack were running Linux or OSX then these would have been designed for that target instead.

    2. Re:Microsoft Windows only by exomondo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This apparently only runs on Windows.

      A targeted attack is going to run on whatever the target uses.

  2. Re:Nation uses malware to spy on ISP Customers... by lostmongoose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Among other things, they were infecting ISP machines to monitor specific customers.

    Anyway, guesses on the responsible party? China, Israel, Russia?

    ...or USA, Britain, France, Germany...