Gauss trojan targets Lebanese banks, likely U.S. creation
Researchers have come across another sophisticated piece of Middle Eastern-targeted espionage malware, which, at the very least, is capable of stealing bank login details, and, at the most extreme, is another Stuxnet.
Dubbed Gauss, the malware was discovered by analysts at Russia-based Kaspersky Lab, the same outfit that detected the Flame virus, which used world-class cryptographic functionality to spread and infect hundreds of machines in Iran to gather intelligence. And researchers found that Gauss, whose main module is named after the 19th century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, was built using the same platform as Flame.
Flame, as well as Stuxnet, are both believed to be collaborative creations of the United States and Israel. Like Flame, Gauss contains several modules so that it can be customized to attack a victim in a certain way, Roel Schouwenberg, a senior anti-virus researcher at Kaspersky, told SCMagazine.com on Thursday. So far, researchers have only gleaned insight about its password-stealing capabilities.
