Mysterious Hackers Hid Their Swiss Army Spyware for 5 Years

Found on Wired on Wednesday, 10 April 2019
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In a talk at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in Singapore Wednesday, Kaspersky security researcher Alexey Shulmin revealed the security firm's discovery of a new spyware framework—an adaptable, modular piece of software with a range of plugins for distinct espionage tasks—that it's calling TajMahal.

"TajMahal is an extremely rare, technically advanced and sophisticated framework, which includes a number of interesting features we have not previously seen in any other APT activity. Coupled with the fact that this APT has a completely new code base—there are no code similarities with other known APTs and malware—we consider TajMahal to be special and intriguing."

There are more than enough governments with lots of money and smart programmers who know what to do. Just because bureaucracy is slow and ineffecient, other state-run programs can be very efficient.