F-Secure Explains Why It Missed Spotting Flame, Despite Having Seen It Two Years Ago
With all the attention on the Flame malware, there's a great post over at Wired by F-Secure's Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hypponen, explaining why various security firms totally missed Flame (and Stuxnet and DuQu) for quite some time -- despite samples having been sent all the way back to 2010. What's refreshing (even as it's surprising) is to see someone so forthright about this being a failure on his part:
What this means is that all of us had missed detecting this malware for two years, or more. That’s a spectacular failure for our company, and for the antivirus industry in general.
It's so rare to see someone admit to a mistake -- especially one that seems so big (even if it doesn't really impact most people outside of the Middle East. Part of the problem, he notes, is that spotting this kind of thing is just beyond what companies like his can do
