Syrian Government Uses Skype To Push Malware To Activists 139
judgecorp writes "The Syrian government is using Skype as a channel to infect activists' systems with malware, installing Trojans and backdoors, according to security firm F-Secure. The evidence comes from a hard drive sent for analysis. 'The activist's system had become infected as a result of a Skype chat. The chat request came from a fellow activist. The problem was that the fellow activist had already been arrested and could not have started the chat. Initial infection occurred when the activist accepted a file called MACAddressChanger.exe over the chat. This utility was supposed to change the hardware MAC address of the system in order to bypass some monitoring tools. Instead, it dropped a file called silvia.exe which was a backdoor — a backdoor called "Xtreme RAT." Xtreme Rat is a full-blown malicious Remote Access Tool.'"