You think that real espionage organizations exist only in films and on the pages of adventure novels? Unfortunately, you are mistaken. Recently, our compatriots from the antivirus company Kaspersky laboratory made a statement that they managed to detect the existence of a powerful and branched spy network. For five years, cybercriminals, remaining unnoticed by anyone, easily received the information they needed from computers and mobile devices of various government agencies and diplomatic organizations. This spy organization, the purpose of which most often became state institutions of the countries of North America, the CIS and Eastern Europe, is called “Red October”.
Vitaly Kamlyuk, leading expert of Kaspersky Laboratory says in his speech: “The first suspicions of the existence of this criminal group appeared in October 2012, when one of our users sent a malicious infected file to us, which seemed too suspicious to him. After analyzing the information received, our experts found that the attack carried out using this file was highly profile and perfectly planned. Files collected by hackers from attacked cars were clearly made that criminals were primarily interested in certain documents of diplomatic organizations of Eastern Europe.
The number and variety of the malicious code of this cyber of the spy network is simply incredible – more than 1000 unique files and 34 types of different modules. And most likely this is only the top of the iceberg.
In the antivirus base of the Kaspersky laboratory, the malicious in “Red October” is classified as Backdoor. Win32.Sputnik. The Trojan module is able to restore its presence on a cured computer, using Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office plugins for this.
In addition to infection of stationary PCs, a spy virus can infect mobile devices, stealing data from USB devices, including files removed from them.
In addition to computers of state structures, the equipment of some oil companies was also infected. The criminals did not ignore the aerospace industry and the film industry. Traces of the attacks of the organization “Red October” were also found in many research institutions around the world, that is, attackers are interested in modern scientific research.
Experts conducted a thorough analysis of this harmful code and found that a trace of Russian -speaking developers is clearly traced in it. Nobody has once encountered such a large -scale and high -quality spy network all over the world.
