Red October Spy Network Goes Dark Hours After Being ExposedChris Dougherty, Contributor The Red October malware campaign targeted governments, embassies and scientific organizations around the world. According to researchers at Kapersky Lab, the spy network had been gathering data and intelligence from mobile devices, computer systems and network equipment for the last five years. The malware, and the complex network design behind it, is rumored to rival the infrastructure of the Flame virus. The Red October malware contains 1,000 separate modules in 30 categories, allowing an attacker the ability to serve unique combinations of payloads to their targets based on the victims specific computer configuration and profile. In an interview with Costin Raiu, of the Kaspersky Lab GReAT Team, Raiu said since Monday, when the first report of the campaign came out, hosting providers and domain owners have been shutting down servers used to help run the campaign. Its clear that the infrastructure is being shut down. This time its being shut down for good, Raiu said. Its not only the registrars killing the domains, and the hosting providers killing the command-and-control servers, but perhaps the attackers shutting down the whole operation. Raiu went on to say that the majority of the servers and domains shut down so far only represent the first level of the threat, essentially the proxy layer. He also speculated that the malware controllers may simply let the operation go dormant for a while until the heat is off. However it seems likely that the attackers would reappear in the near future using updated malware, domains and control servers. Red October is a large and comprehensive attack framework that was designed to enable attackers to conduct long-term operations against their chosen targets. Its likely that researchers havent even scratched the surface with regard to the complexities involved in this campaign. See related article: Chris Doughertyis a grey hat hacker and online security expert. Please visit his blog,www.VirtualThreat.com, for more excellent news and information about protecting yourself in cyberspace. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 