http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/28/governmentbuilt_malware_running_out_of_control_fsecure_tells_trustycon/
By Iain Thomson
The Register
28 Feb 2014
TrustyCon - A surprising number of governments are now deploying their own
custom malware -- and the end result could be chaos for the rest of us,
F-Secure's malware chief Mikko Hyppönen told the TrustyCon conference in
San Francisco on Thursday.
"Governments writing viruses: today we sort of take that for granted but
10 years ago that would have been science fiction," he told the public
conference. "If someone had come to me ten years ago and told me that by
2014 it will be commonplace for democratic Western governments to write
viruses and actively deploy them against other governments, even friendly
governments, I would have thought it was a movie plot. But that's exactly
where we are today."
The US is leading the way in this, he said, having initiated the Stuxnet
malware against Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, although the actions
against the Iranians were part of a much larger program, Operation Olympic
Games, which was initiated by the then-President Bush and carried on by
Obama.
Hyppönen said that he had investigated a Stuxnet sample to see if it could
be modified to attack other targets and found that it could, up to a
point. The specific control code to interfere with the industrial SCADA
control systems used by the Iranians was very difficult to reshape, but
the malware could be reconfigured to introduce random controls to be sent
to an infected industrial plant that could cause havoc.
[...]
--
Find the best IT Security talent without breaking your recruiting budget - Jobs
cross-posted to Simply Hired, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Hot InfoSec Jobs - http://www.hotinfosecjobs.com/
