Kaspersky Lab identifies new malicious program ‘MiniDuke’

New Threat Actors Combine Sophisticated “Old School” Malware Writing Skills with Newly Advanced Exploits in Adobe Reader to Collect Geopolitical Intelligence from High Profile Targets

Today Kaspersky Lab’s team of experts published a new research report that analyzed a series of security incidents involving the use of the recently discovered PDF exploit in Adobe Reader (CVE-2013-6040) and a new, highly customized malicious program known as MiniDuke.

 The MiniDuke backdoor was used to attack multiple government entities and institutions worldwide during the past week. Kaspersky Lab’s experts, in partnership with CrySys Lab, analyzed the attacks in detail and published their findings.

 “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. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyberworld,” said Eugene Kaspersky, Founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab.