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On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:11 AM, Simon Waters wrote: > Not saying it isn't well engineered, just that there isn't enough > evidence in the reports. I doubt there will ever be. Every expert 'knows' Stuxnet was written by the American and/or the Israeli government. No one can prove that though. I think Flame will be a similar story. > Mostly it tells you that current anti-malware practice isn't terribly > good, in that it went undetected for so long. That's a good point and one I've seen people from within the anti-malware industry make, but it's not an entirely fair criticism: it only shows that if you've got enough resources you can defeat/evade security software. 100% security doesn't exist so it's a matter of putting the threshold so high that it's not worth the attackers' effort. If the army of a major country have a reason to attack you, it's damn hard to put the threshold that high. > Nothing I've seen discusses how it gets the data it steals back, > presumably this to is a pluggable module (would make sense), so possibly > it varies with installation. Nor how it is so targeted if it spreads in > virus like fashion. I suspect those two are rather sensitive bits of > information for those infected. People expect full analysis of what Flame is capable of doing may take months, perhaps even years. I've seen reports that mention a command and control server so I presume that's how data is stolen. It is a worm rather than a virus in that it spreads itself but doesn't infect existing files. Targeted worms aren't new. A worm could be targeted at a specific organisation and then spread itself inside the organisation's network. > Plenty of well funded organisations are interested in the Iranian oil > ministry and middle Eastern politics, they are call oil companies or > investment companies that trade in the oil markets. Indeed these days a > lot of them have more money than many national governments, or at least > less debt. I doubt many, if any, companies have the resources that the US army has. They are also pretty good at keeping things secret. Martijn. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq