Flame, Man-in-the-Middle new warnings! – 06-05-2012.
Flame not something you cook with or start fires, but a Virus recently identified in the wild has a new twist, Man-in-the-Middle. I am not going to explain all of the details about these viruses because I don’t completely grasp all of the how to’s either.
The new twist is that the Virus is using other infected machines to infect its victim machine. Two modules identified as “Gadget” and “Munch” redirect a computer when it is trying to communicate with Microsoft’s Update servers. For more details check out Ken Presti’s story at CRN Magazine called Kaspersky Finds New Man-In-The-Middle Attack Within The Flame Worm. The most current attacks seem to stem from Linux based servers identified in Netherlands and began on May 18th.
Flame currently has been identified in 23 countries here in the US we ranks 6th place with 11 identified infections, Israel is in second and Iran tops the list with over 185 victims.
Attacks can be found in PDF, Office, Autocad files the most. Further reading of the article above talks about how the servers went off line when news of Flame hit last week but yet activity is still being identified.
Microsoft has already developed updates for the OS and are part of an emergency update that began downloading on Saturday.
Flame has been identified as a very complex virus possibly one of the most complex malicious programs ever seen.
I have discussed with many of our companies customers that virus/malware attacks are not completely preventable it is only a matter of time and therefore protect your data was important. In this quote from the article it really stresses this point and the industry must rethink its approaches
…Dan Hibbard, CTO of OpenDNS, took Schouwenberg’s point one step further. “We need to change the way we think about security,” he told the news conference. “Right now, it’s about protection and defense. I think we need to move to the mindset that things will get in, which means we need to think about both preventing, maintaining and deciding what we are going to do when something gets into the network.”…
Flame and its companion another malicious thing to find in the world. This technical update presented by the techies at www.end2endsupport.com and E2 Computers of Tarpon Springs.
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