Kaspersky - Regin Malware Copy 1999

The Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab has a copy of the advanced Regin-espionage malware found in 1999. This involves the oldest copy that is known up to now. Earlier, a specimen was labeled in 2003 as a senior. The existence of Regin was recently made ​​public by several anti-virus companies.

Regin Platform Diagram

An analyst at Kaspersky Lab named the malware even more sophisticated than Stuxnet . Yet there was also criticism of the anti-virus companies as long as they would have waited to disclose the information. The Russian anti-virus company this refers to a comparison of Sean Sullivan from F-Secure. He likened the search for Regin with the work of paleontologists who found the bones of an unknown dinosaur. Everyone has a bone, but the entire skeleton is missing.

In the case of Regin Kaspersky Lab discovered in 2012 damaged "bone" of a hitherto unknown malware. Figuring out the size of a particular campaign or espionage malware family can sometimes take months or years, the company notes. As it sometimes worked with other parties who may have other parts of the malware possession. "It makes little sense to publish your discovery until you can confirm that the samples really are big and dangerous," said the Russian anti-virus company.

Most Regin copies date from 2007, 43 pieces in total, followed by 35 copies in 2009. Kaspersky also addresses accusations that anti-virus companies, the existence of Regin would have concealed. "We have never been asked by a customer or government agency to whitelist certain malware or to pass through. We would never meet such a request, no matter who it comes from."

NSA wants to infect millions of computers with malware

According to The Intercept leaked documents obtained from Edward Snowden at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has plans to spread malicious software to control millions of computers.

"Sometimes NSA disguised as Facebook server, using it to infect the target computer, stealing files from the hard drive, while at other times, NSA will send spam containing malware, malicious software through a computer microphone recording, but also take a snapshot camera with a computer ", The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald explained road.

Documents show that the NSA program was confined to infect a network of hundreds of targets, but soon expanded to a larger scale in order to hunt down the suspects.

The Intercept, said: "NSA began 10 years ago, the ability to rapidly increase its invasion of confidential internal records show that in 2004, NSA will manage one of only 100 units to 150 units implanted malware computer network.."

"But in the next six years to eight years, called specific invasion TAO (Tailored Access Operations) elite troops recruited new hackers, and the development of new malware tools, implanted a surge in the number of computer malware to tens of thousands of units. "

And Edward Snowden most leaked files, we do not know how the impact of this project, and whether they have been stopped. It just let us know, NSA on monitoring the Internet has done anything.

Intelligence agencies have long believed that the encryption technology is a threat to national security. Since the beginning of the 1990s , they actively lobbied backdoor access to people from developing computer tools. And recently, they seek to undermine international security standards , in order to hunt down the suspects. However, security experts worry that weaker standards make the Internet becomes more fragile when subjected to attacks by malicious users.

"As long as the backbone infrastructure to open the back door, software and security engineer for me it was horrible," the University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze in an interview with The Intercept interview, said: "Do not think you want to achieve the goal of our NSA. how do you know it will work properly know how it would be confined to the target NSA want to investigate it "