The Russian cyber-security company says the Red October virus has targeted government agencies and other sensitive institutions around the world.
Chief anti-virus expert Vitaly Kamlyuk at work in Moscow at cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab.
In what is being called a new hunt for Red October, a Russian cyber-security company says it has discovered a major international malware system that has attacked and compromised the computers of government agencies, diplomatic consulates, research centers and defense installations, among other sensitive institutions.
The malware has siphoned off terabytes’ worth of information, much of it classified, researchers with Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab said in a report this week. The origin of the program and the motives of the attackers remain elusive, but there are hints that the programmers are Russian, the report says.
“Last October we first received from our clients samples of something we soon gathered was not just a malware program but a multi-component attack platform, initially targeting embassies around the world,” Vitaly Kamlyuk, a senior anti-virus expert at Kaspersky, said in an interview Wednesday. “We called the virus ‘Red October’ because we detected it in October and because it required a level of red-alert attention to tackle.”
Similar to the Flame virus, a now-defunct spyware program Kaspersky thwarted last year, the new virus usually infiltrates computers through an email attachment camouflaged to mimic ordinary business correspondence, the expert said.
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