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The malware reprograms the hard drive’s firmware, creating hidden sectors on the drive that can only be accessed through a secret API (application programming interface). Once installed, the malware is impossible to remove: disk formatting and reinstalling the OS doesn’t affect it, and the hidden storage sector remains. “Theoretically, we were aware of this possibility, but as far as I know this is the only case ever that we have seen of an attacker having such an incredibly advanced capability,” said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team, in a phone interview Monday.

The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists. The National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives, allowing them to monitor and eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers - even when they are not connected to the internet. This 'surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades,' said Kaspersky. 'The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over,' lead Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu said in an...

Link only: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

Saudi hacker dies of asthma attack A Saudi hacker known just as "Cyber Terrorist" died in Riyadh after suffering an apparent acute asthma attack caused by the dust storm that hit the Saudi capital last week, UAE’s al- Bayan newspaper reported on Saturday. The 28-year-old hacker was known for penetrating the most well protected sites including Microsoft, Kaspersky, Milworm, besides the server of another hacker known as the king of hackers Kevin Mitnick. In addition to numerous Jewish sites, banks and major companies, he was also able to hack into the site of the Danish cartoonists who drew caricatures...

Duqu, Stuxnet malware developed by same groupPosted on 20 Jan 2012 at 2:29pm The infamous Trojan software Duqu and Stuxnet were developed by only one group of malware developers, according to Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab. In fact, Kaspersky said the malware development team could already have developed other malwares using the same platform that was flexibly adaptable to specific targets. Kaspersky released a report stating that Duqu and Stuxnet, as well as a number of malware discovered in 2011 were using a development platform called “Tilded,” citing the use of the tilde symbol (“~”) in many of these malware....

<p>Russian anti-virus specialist Kaspersky Labs has identified a variant of MyDoom, the worm that has been spreading through the Internet at a furious pace since Monday.</p> <p>The variant, which Kaspersky has labelled MyDoom.b, has a slightly larger payload compared with MyDoom.a and targets Microsoft Corp. for a denial-of-service attack to be launched starting on Feb. 1, instead of The SCO Group Inc. The worm features minor modifications to the text of the e-mail that carries it, but is otherwise identical to the original.</p>