Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Labs has detected a new type of malware named after a mathematician, “Gauss,” on thousands of computers in the Middle East, including 1,660 in Lebanon alone — the area most affected. Another 43 infected systems were detected in the U.S. The malware appears built to “collect as much information about infected systems as possible, as well as to steal credentials for various banking systems and social network, email and IM accounts,” according to Kaspersky’s analysis.
Here is a map of the various infected machines detected by Kaspersky in the most-affected countries:
Kaspersky believes the malware is a “cyber-espionage toolkit based on” Flame, another type of snooping and information stealing malware that was found in May and is reportedly the work of a U.S. and Isreali effort to undermine Iranian nulcear computers. However, Kaspersky declined to attribute the new Gauss malware to a specific entity.
