Recently, news surfaced that the machines of a number of employees across multiple companies were hacked in malware attacks. The companies included the likes of Apple, Twitter and Facebook. Recently, Facebook’s security chief officer Joe Sullivan has stated that the malware was injected into users’ machines through iPhoneDevSDK.
iPhoneDevSDK is a rather well-known iPhone development website. The malware authors first injected the nefarious software into the website and then, reached out to the visitors’ machines, infecting them. Apparently, the malware was rather intelligent in that it was able to determine the origin of a visitor and didn’t infect every user.
What we do know is that the malware was able to affect the machines of employes in Apple, Microsoft, Twitter as well as Facebook. Some may have considered it an aggregate attack targeted specifically on the tech industry by a foreign element.
However, it is being reported that similar attacks were launched on other industries too. Evidently, the purpose of this malware attack must have been to gather information from different companies, which tends to substantiate the doubts that the attack’s origins are in some other country.
In infecting the Mac machines, this malware made use of a trojan called ‘Pintsized.A.’ This trojan is very clever in that it immediately encrypts the communications between the victim machine and the command n control server. As a result, it becomes really hard for the security software on the machine to detect the presence of a malware.
Source: Security Ledger
Courtesy: VentureBeat
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