By Micah Halpern
I've Been Thinking:
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday that has set off a maelstrom.
The paper reports that a computer virus infected five hotels in Lausanne, Switzerland. Lausanne is where the nuclear talks with Iran have been taking place and where they will continue to take place.
The WSJ's source is Kaspersky, one of the world's biggest antivirus companies. Kaspersky found out about the virus because they themselves were infected.
This virus, called Duqu 2.0, does no damage. It is an advanced version of the Duqu virus of 2011which attacked Iran and it is very similar to the Stuxent virus of 2009-2010. The original Stuxnet successfully destroyed thousands of Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
The virus uses the computer as a relay. It can watch and hear everything going on in the room and everything that is on the computer can be seen and sent to its own home base. The computer's activation light for the microphone and for the camera are disabled by Duqu. The virus takes over the entire computer. There are only a few companies and governments that have the tools to even detect this virus.
If the code is written well, no one can ever even know that the spyware is there.
Both the Wall Street Journal and Kaspersky imply that Israel is behind the spying.
In their report, Kaspersky referred to Duqu 2.0 as Duqu Bet. Bet is the second letter of the Hebrew language with the numerical value of 2. They are clearly hinting that Israel is behind the hack. But there is no tangible evidence.
One thing is for certain, this is not the work of a lone hacker or talented high school kid. This attack bears all the markings of a highly complex worm that cannot be found. This kind of computer spyware is created by countries - they are called APTs or Advanced Persistent Threats. They are the most sophisticated and complicated and stealth of all the computer threats out there.
When they are discovered, APTs have already done their harm. And most of the time, most of them go undetected. They do their job and then they go dormant. Kaput. All done. Good bye. Until next time.
Micah@MicahHalpern.com
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