Computer Virus named after Islamic Messiah found in Iranian and Israeli systems

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

Yet another virus primarily targeting countries in the Middle East has been discovered, this time calledMahdi, after the Islamic Messiah who will, according to Islam, rule the earth before the Day of Judgment.

Much like the astoundingly complex virus known as Flame, this virus can be modified remotely by the attacker in order to record keystrokes, remove documents, monitor email communications and even record audio.

However, according to Costin Raiu, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, this piece of malware is not sophisticated, unlike Flame.

The malware was discovered “several months ago” and has targeted over 800 systems, with the vast majority in Iran, and Israel coming in a distant second, according to Israeli Seculert and Russian Kaspersky Lab.

Interestingly, on Seculert’s July 17 blog they revealed, “The variant we examined communicated with a server located in Canada. We were able to track variants of the same malware back to December 2011. Back then, the malware communicated with the same domain name, but the server was located in Tehran, Iran.”