Stars virus: Iran claims to intercept second cyberwarfare attack

Iranian officials today claimed to have intercepted a cyberwarfare attack, involving malware designed to spy upon government systems.

The malware has been dubbed the “Stars” virus by Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s civil defence organisation, who broke the news on the institution’s website.

Jalali says that the Stars virus continues to be investigated by the country’s experts, and that it could have been “mistaken for executive files of governmental organisations”. That suggests that the attack may have been disguised as a legitimate Word, PDF file or similar document in an attempt to trick unsuspecting victims into infecting government computers.

Inevitably, many people will remember the brouhaha that surrounded the Stuxnet virus last year, and sure enough the media has…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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