Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game



  • I'm as surprised as you are. I mean, I get that they want to spice up the article a little - and this will certainly get attention - but... seriously? That's your headline?

    (As a little bonus, the article contains a lot of confused mixed metaphors. As in, a bomb that is also an army.)



  •  TRWTF is that anyone can be a journalist



  • Based off of their logic every single program ever written in the same language is tied together.  This journalist should get a slap to the back of the head.


  • 🚽 Regular

    Ugh, now I'm going to have to try to calm my Fox News fanatic parents down who will inevitably think Angry Birds is responsible for Flame.

    In other news, it's found that Intel and/or AMD are also tied to Flame, as the programmers most likely used either processor to code the virus... investigators will try to determine which shipping company and retailer was used to purchase those computers, which manufacturer built the chairs they sat on while coding Flame, try to see which tutorial websites or computer science teachers they had to learn how to code it, and which farmers supplied the supermarkets or restaurants with the food they ate... soon, nearly everyone will be tied to Flame's conception.

    ...actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Iran's government was seriously using that logic to implicate everyone in the western world for this.



  • Great, now my computer-illiterate family and friends are going to ask me a million questions about how much of their computer is messed up because they played Angry Birds. And even though they will ask me because I'm relatively tech-savvy, they won't believe anything I say, because they saw this on the news and it must be right, ya know?



  • Snap guys, my house is directly related to a terrorist's house, because hammers were used in their construction



  • @lettucemode said:

    Snap guys, my house is directly related to a terrorist's house, because hammers were used in their construction

    What house? Do you live a cave or something?



  • @mott555 said:

    And even though they will ask me because I'm relatively tech-savvy, they won't believe anything I say, because they saw this on the news and it must be right, ya know?

    YES. My mom (and to a lesser degree, my sister) do this all the time. Just last week I called my mom and left a voicemail. She called back a few minutes later and said "That was odd, I got a voicemail indicator on my phone, but it never rang or showed I missed a call." I said "That's not so odd; it's possible your phone was just out-of-range for a moment when I called. Your phone doesn't know it's missed a call if it didn't get the call. Instead it just went to voicemail." She then replied with "How could it be out-of-range? I'm less than 10 miles from my house.. it's not like I'm in California or something." I tried to explain that phones can just temporarily lose signal and that it has nothing to do with proximity to your house and that even in California she'd probably have service, so long as it was a populated area. She was quiet for a beat and then said "Naw, that's not how it works." D:



  • @lettucemode said:

    Snap guys, my house is directly related to a terrorist's house, because hammers were used in their construction
     

    Not only that, but it appears you speak English. Well so do some terrorists!

    We caught one! Now to get his address so we can notify the authorities...



  • @FoxBullshit said:

    Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons.

    @FoxMorons said:
    But this new weapon is twenty times the size of earlier cyberbombs and far more powerful, making it practically an army on its own, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior security researcher with Kaspersky Labs.

    ooh, yess, let's measure code in megatons, not LOC from now on. after all, it works the same way!



  • @mott555 said:

    @lettucemode said:

    Snap guys, my house is directly related to a terrorist's house, because hammers were used in their construction
     

    Not only that, but it appears you speak English. Well so do some terrorists!

    We caught one! Now to get his address so we can notify the authorities...

    No, he's not a terrorist until the FBI forces him to buy and plant a bomb.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @FoxBullshit said:
    Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons.

    @FoxMorons said:
    But this new weapon is twenty times the size of earlier cyberbombs and far more powerful, making it practically an army on its own, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior security researcher with Kaspersky Labs.

    ooh, yess, let's measure code in megatons, not LOC from now on. after all, it works the same way!

    That last one sounds like a quote from the guy at Kapersky, but it's not in quotation marks.. But the phrasing is so specific I don't see how it could be paraphrased.



  • Tempted to go write some malware in UScript, as it'll drag the whole of UE3 along for the ride (~40mb exe) making it the BIGGEST MALWARE EVER.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    That last one sounds like a quote from the guy at Kapersky, but it's not in quotation marks.. But the phrasing is so specific I don't see how it could be paraphrased.

    I think it's safe to say it's either entirely the work of the journalist (fantasy author?), or poor Roel was so ridiculously mis-quoted that even Fox News didn't feel right putting quotation marks around it.

    Because nobody at Kaspersky Labs is that stupid.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    She's generally a good reporter on national security type stuff. I can't believe that she knows enough about programming languages to make the Lua connection. I guess it was an off-hand sort of remark from the retired AF guy that gave them an interesting tangential hook.

    There are a few references to "cyber bomb" out there. It sounds like the kind of thing the military or intelligence community would come up with. The earliest I could find was from 2010 in The Cypress Times, which references a Fox News story (but the Fox story never uses the word "bomb."



  • FOX News Tied To Child Pornography

    The most idiotic and incompetent news web site uncovered to date was written in the HTML computer language -- the same one used to make nearly every child pornography site in existence.

    See how easy that is?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    That last one sounds like a quote from the guy at Kapersky, but it's not in quotation marks.. But the phrasing is so specific I don't see how it could be paraphrased.

    So now "cyberbomb" is a real synonym to virus? Anyways, the sentence perfectly fits the hysteria-laden rest of the article, and the phrasing strongly suggest that whoever produced it thought of relation between size and power in the way it works in real bombs, hence I don't buy it. What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"? And why am I defending the fact that I attributed the quote to Fox only because I was reading too fast to notice or care that they claimed someone at Kaspersky said it? The sentence just sounds silly to me no matter who produced it.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    Anyways, the sentence perfectly fits the hysteria-laden rest of the article, and the phrasing strongly suggest that whoever produced it thought of relation between size and power in the way it works in real bombs, hence I don't buy it.

    There's a lot of speculation that this came from a nation state, which suggests some sort of military involvement, which suggests weaponization. That seems the most likely reason.

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    It's not just a little bit bigger. Kaspersky has talked about how typical malware tries to hide, in part, by being as small as possible, if for no other reason than to not draw attention to itself over flaky network connections. This is a multi-megabyte piece of software, so that makes it quite a bit different.

    But I suppose it would be disappointing for discussions at TDWTF to deal with the important aspects of something and not focus on trivia.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.



  • @boomzilla said:

    trivia.

    For $400: It's "common sense" that this English-born pamphleteer played a central role in both American and French revolutions before moving on to advocate a national retirement plan.

    Please remember to phrase your reply in the form of a question.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @boomzilla said:
    trivia.

    For $400: It's "common sense" that this English-born pamphleteer played a central role in both American and French revolutions before moving on to advocate a national retirement plan.

    Please remember to phrase your reply in the form of a question.

     

    Ooh ooh I got it!

    Who is... morbiuswilters talking about?



  • My suggestion:

    headline: "Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to Journalists at Fox News"

    The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written by humans, cyber security experts tell Fox News -- the exact same species that also wrote this god-dawful, sensationalist and poorly researched article.

    Humans are often used in both Journalism and Virus writing, says Mr Bob Example, a person who by an amazing co-incidence just also happens to run a security company and could benefit from some free publicity.



  • @nexekho said:

    Tempted to go write some malware in UScript, as it'll drag the whole of UE3 along for the ride (~40mb exe) making it the BIGGEST MALWARE EVER.
    I'm sorry. Visual Studio is bigger.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @mott555 said:
    And even though they will ask me because I'm relatively tech-savvy, they won't believe anything I say, because they saw this on the news and it must be right, ya know?

    YES. My mom (and to a lesser degree, my sister) do this all the time. Just last week I called my mom and left a voicemail. She called back a few minutes later and said "That was odd, I got a voicemail indicator on my phone, but it never rang or showed I missed a call." I said "That's not so odd; it's possible your phone was just out-of-range for a moment when I called. Your phone doesn't know it's missed a call if it didn't get the call. Instead it just went to voicemail." She then replied with "How could it be out-of-range? I'm less than 10 miles from my house.. it's not like I'm in California or something." I tried to explain that phones can just temporarily lose signal and that it has nothing to do with proximity to your house and that even in California she'd probably have service, so long as it was a populated area. She was quiet for a beat and then said "Naw, that's not how it works." D:

     

    It gets more fun when you try to explain the difference between signal strength across different network providers. I've had the near same conversation with people who swore that because their friend had signal that the reason they didn't was because of a faulty phone.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Because nobody at Kaspersky Labs is that stupid.
    For a moment there I thought you weren't joking!



  • @toshir0 said:

    @nexekho said:

    Tempted to go write some malware in UScript, as it'll drag the whole of UE3 along for the ride (~40mb exe) making it the BIGGEST MALWARE EVER.
    I'm sorry. Visual Studio is bigger.

    Heyooo



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.

    Fox News is liberal media now? How far right must the right wing in the US be for that to happen?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @_gaffer said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.

    Fox News is liberal media now? How far right must the right wing in the US be for that to happen?

    Counter-troll or humor-impaired? We retort, you decide!



  • @boomzilla said:

    @_gaffer said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.

    Fox News is liberal media now? How far right must the right wing in the US be for that to happen?

    Counter-troll or humor-impaired? We retort, you decide!

    It's just sometimes I feel like I have to ask. What with the Tea Party and other overly publicised, high grade lunatics, the line between genuine reporting and parody of US politics has gotten very blurred.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @_gaffer said:

    @boomzilla said:
    @_gaffer said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.

    Fox News is liberal media now? How far right must the right wing in the US be for that to happen?

    Counter-troll or humor reason-impaired? We retort, you decide!

    It's just sometimes I feel like I have to ask. What with the Tea Party and other overly publicised, high grade lunatics, the line between genuine reporting and parody of US politics has gotten very blurred.

    Hmm...it's somewhat ambiguous, but this new statement of yours seems to say that people who believe that a government should not borrow itself into Grecian insolvency are "high grade lunatics." So I FTFM so that my previous post covers both of your statements.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @_gaffer said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.

    Fox News is liberal media now? How far right must the right wing in the US be for that to happen?

    Counter-troll or humor-impaired? We retort, you decide!

    This is what I get for trying to make people laugh on a website where people think xkcd and The IT Crowd are funny. The thing I love about TDWTF is that the inhabitants are such aspie twats that they take every single joke as a literal statement of truth and then start a flamewar because they can't understand the difference between humor and trolling. It's like Slashdot, except most of the people have been laid. Once.



  • @_gaffer said:

    It's just sometimes I feel like I have to ask. What with the Tea Party and other overly publicised, high grade lunatics, the line between genuine reporting and parody of US politics has gotten very blurred.

    Sorry, I'd forgotten what a proud beacon of liberty, prosperity and sensibility the Czech Republic is. Clearly we should be taking lessons from a country where the age of governments rivals good Scotch. That is, when it's not being occupied by a foreign-sponsored dictatorship.


    Actually, that was uncalled for. I like and respect the Czech Republic and admire its progress over the last 19 years. I just think you are a dipshit.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @boomzilla said:
    @_gaffer said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    What's so special and worth mentioning about a virus being "bigger than any before"?

    Well, that does sound news-worthy to me. I agree that when it comes to this kind of thing the liberal media likes to wallow in hysterical fearmongering.

    Fox News is liberal media now? How far right must the right wing in the US be for that to happen?

    Counter-troll or humor-impaired? We retort, you decide!

    This is what I get for trying to make people laugh on a website where people think xkcd and The IT Crowd are funny. The thing I love about TDWTF is that the inhabitants are such aspie twats that they take every single joke as a literal statement of truth and then start a flamewar because they can't understand the difference between humor and trolling. It's like Slashdot, except most of the people have been laid. Once.

    I don't know whether it's a different sense of humour or constantly switching between hearing English, broken English, and Czech (which I have only a rudimentary grasp of) that made me miss the point there long enough to post a reply, but oh well, this sort of thing happens.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @_gaffer said:
    It's just sometimes I feel like I have to ask. What with the Tea Party and other overly publicised, high grade lunatics, the line between genuine reporting and parody of US politics has gotten very blurred.

    Sorry, I'd forgotten what a proud beacon of liberty, prosperity and sensibility the Czech Republic is. Clearly we should be taking lessons from a country where the age of governments rivals good Scotch. That is, when it's not being occupied by a foreign-sponsored dictatorship.


    Actually, that was uncalled for. I like and respect the Czech Republic and admire its progress over the last 19 years. I just think you are a dipshit.

    And I think you're a pompous arsehole. Hurrah!

    The Czech Republic has been doing pretty well, and seems to have developed a healthy form of nationalism (i.e. pride in itself rather than the xenophobia that is growing in some other countries, such as the rise of the Svoboda party in Ukraine).
    I'm actually originally from Australia, also a pretty young country in the scheme of things, where politics has been a bit of a mixed bag lately.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    they take every single joke as a literal statement of truth and then start a flamewar because they can't understand the difference between humor and trolling fucking love that.
    I know you figured that long ago. Is it just your brain refusing the very idea to protect you ?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @morbiuswilters said:

    This is what I get for trying to make people laugh on a website where people
    think xkcd and The IT Crowd are funny.
    I think the mod-mob with Rosie sorted out (if only temporarily) the former. There's no hope for the latter. Other (non-techie) half think's it's funny - I'm trying to disabuse them of that notion. With limited results...



  • I like you guys. But I am kind of a dipshit (and/or aspie twat), so there's that.



  • @_gaffer said:

    I'm actually originally from Australia, also a pretty young country in the scheme of things, where politics has been a bit of a mixed bag lately.

    I hear they want to start taxing your riding kangaroo to reduce carbon emissions and the health nuts want to limit the number of shrimp allowed concurrently on a single barbie!



  • @Yukabacera said:

    I like you guys. But I am kind of a dipshit (and/or aspie twat), so there's that.

    You seem fine to me. I don't hate you.


    Yet.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @_gaffer said:
    I'm actually originally from Australia, also a pretty young country in the scheme of things, where politics has been a bit of a mixed bag lately.

    I hear they want to start taxing your riding kangaroo to reduce carbon emissions and the health nuts want to limit the number of shrimp allowed concurrently on a single barbie!

    Australians will always find a way around these restrictions.

    They tried to limit us to one case of beer per person per day at the Bathurst races, which is practically tee totalling. We responded by going up to the site early and burying beer in advance to dig up later.

    Pretty soon there'll just be a lot of kangaroos disguised as emus (they're exempt from the new tax), and any reprimands on shrimp density will be responded to simply with "they're prawns ya fucken idiot, not shrimp. Where the hell are you from, anyway?"

    Health nuts will be dealt with in the traditional Australian manner (i.e. being held down and slathered with the contents of the barbie's drip tray, then being driven through the streets and pelted with thongs ("flip flops" to the brits and the septics, "jandals" if there are any kiwis here)).



  • So all I need to do is to email this 'cyberweapon' to my enemy and I'll be able to view all the webcams, contacts, and bluetooth connected devices on the building then?

    and its all free?

    bargain!



  • @boomzilla said:

    I can't believe that she knows enough about programming languages to make the Lua connection.

    Considering they spelled it in all caps, I doubt they know what Lua really is. They probably thought it was an acronym.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Soviut said:

    @boomzilla said:
    I can't believe that she knows enough about programming languages to make the Lua connection.

    Considering they spelled it in all caps, I doubt they know what Lua really is. They probably thought it was an acronym.

    I read the post from the guy at Kaspersky, and he had it in all caps. Some guy in the comments told them they were doing it wrong, and it looks like it has been updated to fix that. A lot of people seem to do that, but you get that with perl, too, and from people who use actually use it.



  • @boomzilla said:

    but you get that with perl, too, and from people who use actually use it.

    That's because it stands for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister".



  •  The one thing I like about US politics is that it seems pretty simple: either you're a hippie or a jock. You probably have normal people there as well but whatever, that would be boring news.



  • @arh said:

    You probably have normal people there as well...

    Nope!



  • @Yukabacera said:

    I'm as surprised as you are.

    It's Fox News. What do you expect?



  • @boomzilla said:

    Grecian insolvency
     

    Please excuse me as I use these words to poetically confound the simple of mind.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:
    Grecian insolvency

    Please excuse me as I use these words to poetically confound the simple of mind.

    Q: What's a Grecian Urn?

    A: Nothing, according to his tax return.



  • @Cassidy said:

    @boomzilla said:

    but you get that with perl, too, and from people who use actually use it.

    That's because it stands for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister".

    Which museum do you have that joke on loan from?



  • @boomzilla said:

    @dhromed said:
    @boomzilla said:
    Grecian insolvency
    Please excuse me as I use these words to poetically confound the simple of mind.
    Q: What's a Grecian Urn?
    A: Nothing, according to his tax return.
     

    Maybe the veal is better.


Log in to reply