Bruce Schneier on Flame-Like Malware: It's All About the Way It Spreads
F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen has recently explained why security companies have failed to catch malware like Duqu, Stuxnet and Flame before they became widely known.
In an article written for Wired, Hypponen admitted that the antivirus industry had failed because it couldn’t see that Flame, which had been in their possession since 2010, could pose a serious threat.
He admitted that the same thing happened with Duqu and Stuxnet and concluded that malware developed by military intelligence agencies was harder to combat with commercial antivirus products. “They can protect you against run-of-the-mill malware: banking trojans, keystroke loggers and e-mail worms. But targeted attacks like these go to great lengths to avoid antivirus products on purpose. And the zero-day exploits used in these attacks are unknown to antivirus companies by definition,” he said.
