[Noisebridge-discuss] Flame malware tries to delete itself

[Jake]

here is a virus clearly created by either the US or Israel and while it 
seems the coders put lots of bells and whistles into it, they certainly 
didn't code it in assembler...

it seems that it's being picked apart pretty easily, which suggests to me 
some sort of modern high-level compiler.  They even identified the DATE 
when the self-deleting routine was written.. because the compiler threw in 
metadata into the code?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18365844

Security firm Symantec caught the command using booby-trapped computers 
set up to watch Flame's actions.

Flame came to light after the UN's telecoms body asked for help with 
identifying a virus found stealing data from many PCs in the Middle East.

New analysis of Flame reveals how sophisticated the program is and gives 
hints about who created it.

Clean machine
Like many other security firms Symantec has kept an eye on Flame using 
so-called "honeypot" computers that report what happens when they are 
infected with a malicious program.

Described as a very sophisticated cyber-attack, Flame targeted countries 
such as Iran and Israel and sought to steal large amounts of sensitive 
data.

Earlier this week Symantec noticed that some Flame command and control 
(C&C) computers sent an urgent command to the infected PCs they were 
overseeing.

Flame's creators do not have access to all their C&C computers as security 
firms have won control of some of them.

The "suicide" command was "designed to completely remove Flame from the 
compromised computer", said Symantec.

The command located every Flame file sitting on a PC, removed it and then 
overwrote memory locations with gibberish to thwart forensic examination.

"It tries to leave no traces of the infection behind," wrote the firm on 
its blog.

Analysis of the clean-up routine suggested it was written in early May, 
said Symantec.

Crypto crash
At the same time, analysis of the inner workings of Flame reveal just how 
sophisticated it is.

According to cryptographic experts, Flame is the first malicious program 
to use an obscure cryptographic technique known as "prefix collision 
attack". This allowed the virus to fake digital credentials that had 
helped it to spread.

The exact method of carrying out such an attack was only demonstrated in 
2008 and the creators of Flame came up with their own variant.

"The design of this new variant required world-class cryptanalysis," said 
cryptoexpert Marc Stevens from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in 
Amsterdam in a statement.

The finding gives support to claims that Flame must have been built by a 
nation state rather than cybercriminals because of the amount of time, 
effort and resources that must have been put into its creation. It is not 
yet clear which nation created the program.