Cyber threat designers “shared source code”, say researchers

Your Expert Witness PCB picResearchers at the Russian-based IT security company Kaspersky Lab have revealed that the people responsible for two powerful malware threats, Flame and Stuxnet/Duqu, must have worked together at some point because of the discovery of shared source code.

Alexander Gostev, Kaspersky Lab's chief security expert, said: "The new findings that reveal how the teams shared source code of at least one module in the early stages of development prove that the groups co-operated at least once."

Vitaly Kamluk, the firm's chief malware expert, said: "We think that these teams are different; two different teams working with each other, helping each other at different stages."

Prof Alan Woodward, a security expert from the University of Surrey who also works with the Charteris network of IT experts and expert witnesses, told the BBC: "The fact that they shared source code further suggests that it wasn't just someone copying or reusing one bit of Stuxnet or Flame that they had found in the wild, but rather those that wrote the code passed it over.

"However, everything else still indicates that Flame and Stuxnet were written designed and built by a completely separate group of developers. At the very least it suggests there are two groups capable of building this type of code but they are somehow collaborating, albeit only in a minor way."

Picture courtesy of Freeimages.co.uk