Cyber ​​weapons MiniDuke been created in 2011 - BitDefender

Last week, Kaspersky Lab has published a report about a new dangerous malicious code MiniDuke, which is a variety of IT-fashioned criminals so-called cyber weapons - an advanced tool of secret data collection and monitoring of target systems.

As stated in the joint statement, Kaspersky Lab and laboratory Crysys (Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security) at the University of Technology and Economics Budapest, MiniDuke to penetrate the target system using a vulnerability in the software, Adobe Reader, working with PDF-files.

The company Adobe has released a patch on February 20, blocking MiniDuke work this way.

However, the Romanian antivirus company BitDefender reports that according to its information MiniDuke is not that the new code and its roots go back in June 2011 - a year and a half before, as this code became known. And in May 2012, according to the logs of system operations, BitDefender received from an unnamed client of the company, MiniDuke already actively infecting computers.

MiniDuke - a new cyber-espionage tool

Kaspersky Lab has published a report on the study of a number of incidents that took place last week, and yet another example relating to cyber espionage against government agencies and research organizations around the world.

During an attack used a combination of sophisticated malware "old school" virus writers and new advanced technologies for vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader - and all this in order to get the data from the geopolitical nature of the organizations.

Malicious program MiniDuke spread by a recently discovered exploit for Adobe Reader (CVE-in 2013-6040). According to a study conducted by Kaspersky Lab in cooperation with the Hungarian company CrySys Lab, among victims kibershpionskoy MiniDuke programs were state institutions of Ukraine, Belgium, Portugal, Romania, the Czech Republic and Ireland. In addition, the actions of cyber criminals suffered Research Institute, two scientific issledovatelskiyh center and medical facility in the United States, as well as research fund in Hungary.