Belgian justice investigating large-scale malware attack public services

Belgium lwa is heavily affected by a major attack with the MiniDuke malware, and among other things, a whole series of public institutions is affected. The federal public prosecutor’s office in the country shows that this year started an investigation to the attack.

A spokeswoman for the federal public prosecutor’s office wants to be alone at The Time confirm that this year an investigation has been launched, making the size of the malware attack in the public administration is unknown. The newspaper knows to report that Belgium is one of the more severely affected countries in the world. The Federal Computer Crime Unit of the country therefore investigates the extent and origin of the attack. Thursday revealed The Time that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an investigation has been launched to a hack that at the beginning of last year is discovered. That attack is independent of the new revelations.

Kaspersky discovered the beginning of this year a MiniDuke attack, but the malware has been around since 2011. The security company noted in February 2013, all public services were victims. The malware exploits a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and the attackers distribute MiniDuke by targets entice to an e-mail attachment with an infected pdf file to open it. After infection is a small, written in assembly malwarebestand on the computer, that all his communications with the outside world encrypts with a machine unique code. The malware is advanced defined and can itself for example, to disable when it detects that it is in a virtual environment is rotated.

According to The Time, the pdf files names that referred to mensenrechtenconferenties and NATO memberships. The message comes a few days after the statements of the Belgian minister of Foreign Affairs Didier Reynders, that NATO countries and the Belgian Federal public service Foreign Affairs in 2011 were victims of a large-scale spying attack, where he, according to HLN to Chinese companies, referred to.

The news also comes after a week in which was revealed that Belgacom was a victim of overheidsspionage. From documents whistleblower Snowden show that the British intelligence service was behind it.