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Nice story. But this is HN: Now how do we ensure our servers are unaffected?
by mooneater 12y ago
Nice story.
But this is HN: Now how do we ensure our servers are unaffected?
- throwawayaway 12y agoLooking at the PDF it appears that it's Windows specific.
- rsync 12y agoExactly. I read through the page twice trying to simply determine "is this interesting to me at all". No, it's not. As usual, you can thwart "nation state" malware by simply not running Windows. Wake me when there's malware for FreeBSD (seriously - it would change my world).
- jmartinpetersen 12y agoI'm sorry, but this seems incredibly naive. Stuff like this, which is apparently used against designated targets, surfaces because Symantec and similar companies casts an incredibly wide net looking for odd stuff in the wild. Few does this at a large scale for Linux, and I guess nobody does it for FreeBSD. But just because noone has caught sophisticated malware from a nation state in the wild doesn't mean it isn't there. So even if the code doesn't apply to you, the determination this shows from the attacker, would if you have something to hide. Do you seriously expect the NSA (or their chinese counter parts) just to give up and go home if a target they are interested in happens to use something else than Windows?
- rsync 12y agoNo, no ... certainly running a non-windows OS does not protect you from the actual nation-state. But the takeaway here is how we should update our threat levels and paranoia levels as a result of this new knowledge. In this case, as usual, it appears to be "not much".
- ReinhartHack 12y agoPerhaps antivirus deployment on Linux is low enough that they simply didn't encounter the Linux version. One fairly telltale thing would be if there were indications of a platform abstraction layer, but the report does not mention anything like that.