New spy program "Mini Duke" discovered

Kaspersky Lab has identified new malware, known as “MiniDuke,” used to attack multiple government entities and institutions worldwide during the past week, the Russian computer security company said in a press release on Wednesday.

Kaspersky Lab published a new research report analyzing security incidents involving the use of the recently discovered PDF exploit in Adobe Reader (CVE-2013-6040) and a new customized malicious program, MiniDuke. Kaspersky experts, jointly with Hungary’s CrySys Lab, analyzed the attacks in detail.

Government entities in Ukraine, Belgium, Portugal, Romania, the Czech Republic and Ireland are believed to have been compromised by MiniDuke attacks, just as a research institute, two think tanks, a healthcare provider in the United States, and a prominent research foundation in Hungary.

“This is a very unusual cyberattack. I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s,” Eugene Kaspersky, Kaspersky Lab founder and CEO, said.

“MiniDuke’s highly customized backdoor was written in Assembler and is very small in size, being only 20kb. The combination of experienced old school malware writers using newly discovered exploits and clever social engineering to compromise high profile targets is extremely dangerous,” he added.