"Red October" Espionage Malware Campaign Uncovered 53
L3sPau1 writes "For five years, it hid in the weeds of networks used by Eastern European diplomats, government employees and scientific research organizations, stealing data and infecting more machines in an espionage campaign rivaling Flame and others of its ilk. The campaign, called Rocra or Red October by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, focused not only on workstations, but mobile devices and networking gear to gain a foothold inside strategic organizations. Once inside, attackers pivoted internally and stole everything from files on desktops, smartphones and FTP servers, to email databases using exploits developed in Chinese and Russian malware, Kaspersky researchers said."
Re:Not just that- (Score:4, Informative)
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Captain, I - I - I just...
Captain Ramius: Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.
The Hunt for Red October
Question already answered (Score:5, Informative)
"The antivirus industry has a dirty little secret: its products are often not very good at stopping viruses." [nytimes.com]
(The linked New York Times story is a great read.)
Re:Time to ask some hard questions (Score:5, Informative)
How can I now trust symantic to find a zero day and protect my systems...
You can't. You do not understand how malware/viruses work. If I wanted to write a virus to infect YOUR computer, it would never be detected. Antvirus software protects you against known threats. That's it. Someone, somewhere, figures out they are infected, figures out the file doing the infection and sends it in to Symantec or whomever. They find common code in the infected file that resembles other files that are infected and now they have something to look for when scanning. If no-one ever figures out that they are infected, and the people that wrote the virus didn't use bits of code from other viruses, then there's no way for the anti-virus companies to search for it.
Some of the better antivirus packages scan for "suspect behavior" and such, but it really doesn't do much good. Antivirus protects you from getting the eveil toolbar viruses... stuff written by the worlds intelligence organizations that do not take over the computer and infest it with ads so the users never has a clue anything is wrong? It's never going to find that.