New Mahdi Strain of Spyware Targets Iran & Israel

The discovery of the Flamevirus earlier this year brought cyberespionage to the international stage. Flame is highly sophisticated spyware, software designed to snoop on infected machines, of unprecedented complexity and scale. But spyware does not need to be created by government-backed hackers to be highly effective. Sometimes simple viruses work just as well. That is the lesson of Mahdi, a new strain of spyware discovered on computers in the Middle East and Iran.

Mahdi (also termed Madi) was discovered by security firm Kaspersky Labs in conjunction with Seculert. The spyware is propagated by a clever ploy known in security circles as spear-phishing. The term phishing refers to using links in social media and email to lure users to visit a malicious website or to download... [via ReadWriteWeb]