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.”

New Class of Malware Will Steal Behavioral Patterns

Computer scientists predict that a new generation of malware will mine social networks for people's private patterns of behavior.

Technology Review

It's not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares.

But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network--how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.

This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.

Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems.

"There is no reason to think that developers of malicious applications will not implement the same method and algorithms into future malware, or that they have not already started doing so," they say.

The idea would be to release some kind of malware that records the patterns of links in a network. This kind of malware will be very hard to detect, say Altshuler and co. They've studied the strategies that best mine behavioral pattern data from a real mobile phone network consisting of 800,000 links between 200,000 phones. (They call this type of attack "Stealing Reality".)

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