Duqu

U.S. officials finally acknowledged a years-long cyberwar campaign against Iran and other countries according to the NYT. The admission is no surprise, but hearing cyberwar is a real option (and a real risk) gives hackers an overt place on the global stage for the first time.

Sure it's invasive, sure it's malware, sure it's an act of war, cyberespionage and digital trespassing all in one. But think how smoothly an app would have to install, do its work and copy itself elsewhere without being discovered. Then compare that to Windows. Cyberweapon FTW!

Symantec captured a new version of the module the Stuxnet descendant Duqu uses to penetrate new systems, but not the part that shows where it gets its orders. Kaspersky, meanwhile, cracked the mystery of Duqu's mysterious coding language and identified characteristics of the coding team that built it; nothing's sure, but the profile is consistent with government work.

Things are heating up in the conflict over Iran's nuclear program. Iran sentenced an American to death this week as the U.N. confirmed Iran had moved much of its most sensitive equipment into a protected bunker and another in a series of attacks killed an Iranian nuclear scientist.

Iran claims it shot down a U.S. RQ-170 spy drone, but won't release proof or say if a new Russian electronic counter-measures system brought it down. Killed or crashed, the drone is one shot in a a cyber/real war using malware, murder and explosive sabotage as weapons.

The newly discovered Son-of-Stuxnet malware named Duqu may have been around longer than anyone thought.

The newest version of intelligent, adaptable, multimodular malware Duqu is even smarter than the last version of Stuxnet 2.0, but is still apparently designed just for industrial espionage, which seems like wasting evil brilliance on building better moustraps.