One of the World’s most pre-eminent cyber security firms revealed on Wednesday that its systems had been breached by unknown hackers. The Moscow based company revealed that the hackers stayed away from customer data and focused instead on Kaspersky’s intellectual property and the company’s own systems. Kaspersky CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, said the hack was almost invisible making it nearly impossible to find the breach. “The software was so sophisticated it could have cost $10m “maybe more” to build it and support it”, he said. Kaspersky believes the hack was meant to spy on its newest and latest technologies.
The attack has been linked to an earlier attack to the unidentified creators of an earlier Trojan named Duqu, which made headlines in 2011 after being used in attacks on Iran, India, France and Ukraine. This based on the techniques used in the intrusion, which were similar to three previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities used to breach its systems. The malware in the attack does not write the files to disk but instead resides in the memory of the affected computers. The malware spread in the company’s network through Microsoft Software Installer files commonly used by system administrators to deploy software on remote Windows computers.
The malware was discovered when an security team was testing a new antivirus product on its own network. The Company also announced that the three zero days exploited by the hackers, allowing them to gain entry into the systems have since patched up by Microsoft. Security concerns in cyber security continue to grow with world leaders calling for tighter laws in this space during the G7 Summit in Germany. These attacks have ranged from DDOS, social engineering to breaches in user data for large consumer companies.
