Researchers Find ‘Impossible to Trace’ Spyware in 32 Countries

motherboard.vice.com

65 points·geezsundries··7 comments

Title is somewhat misleading: "impossible to trace" refers to FinFisher's marketing claims for the spyware they sell, which security researches have found to be not so true after all. The way the title is worded, one would assume the discovery being reported is a new unknown and "impossible to trace" spyware infecting computers around the world.

Misleading indeed. A more accurate title is "People are still buying FinFisher, and they still don't do much to hide their C&C servers."

Yeah! I was hoping that this was a discovery of NSA malware, something that only a nation-state could put together. I mean, we've all heard of Stuxnet and Flame and Duqu and the Equation Group, but there's still some nagging doubt that those were really NSA malware.

They probably already did: plenty about Equation Group points in their direction.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/02/the_equation_...

Its methods are quite sophisticated and careful compared to most. Like the Snowden leaks plus with some of the same specifics. There should be no doubt on Stuxnet at this point: it was a joint US and Israeli attack.

Well, they tried an ironic "tongue-in-cheek" title, let's not burn them.

tl;dr: Proxied FinFisher boxes serve up google.com when opened in a browser. Actual IP address revealed by entering the query "what's my ip".

What a BS title. Not even reading it tonight for that. Someone tell the writer to come back when he or she is writing on one whose cloaking and obfuscation techniques deserve the claim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com