Security experts have found out an ongoing cyber espionage campaign that targets Iran and other countries in the Middle East. The latest cyber attack made a big splash since it uses communications tools written in Persian.

Tehran / NationalTurk – Russian technology company Kaspersky Lab, one of the world’s leading producers of anti-virus software, claims its experts revealed Flame during a probe launched by the International Telecommunication Union.

Israeli security company Seculert and Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, stated on Tuesday that they recognized in a joint investigation more than 800 victims of the cyber operation taht targeted critical infrastructure firms, engineering students, financial services companies and government embassies located in five Middle Eastern countries, with the majority of the infections in Iran’s infrastructure.

Cyber attack campaign on Iran and other Middle eastern countries started 8 months ago

Seculert and Kaspersky rejected to identify specific targets of the cyber attack campaign, which they believe initiated at least 8 months ago. They refrain from stating who was behind the cyber attacks on Iran or if was a nation state that led the attack.

Seculert Chief Technology Officer Aviv Raff said ‘ It’s certainly somebody who is fluent in Persian, the origin of the cyber assailants remain a mystery even for us.’

Both tech companies state they believe multiple gigabytes of data have been uploaded from targeted hardware systems.

Mahdi Trojan atrocity : Named after Redeemer of Islam it cyber attacks muslim countries cyber defense systems

One tool of the cyber attack on Iran is suspected to be The Mahdi Trojan which lets remote attackers steal files from infected machines and monitor emails and instant messages, according to Seculert and Kaspersky experts. Mahdi refers to the prophesied redeemer of Islam. Ther cyber attacks also include a text file named mahdi.txt in the malicious software that infectes target machines and software and hardware systems.

The trojan virus is also able to record audio, log keystrokes and take screen shots of activity on those systems.

Researchers have previously said that nation states were almost certainly behind the Flame virus, which was discovered earlier this year, and Duqu, which was uncovered in 2011. The idea is backed up by Seculert Chief Technology Officer Aviv Raff  : ‘ Somebody is trying to build a dossier of a larger scale on something, but we don’t know what they will do at the end.’

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