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The news is sensational, according the French magazine L'Express
the offices of France's former president Sarkozy were victim of a cyber attack,
but what is even more remarkable is that for the offensive was used the famous Malware Flame.
On the origin of the Malware still persist a mystery, many
security experts attribute it to joint work of Israel and US development team.
Let's remind that according the analysis on Flame source code conducted
by Kaspersky the Malware is linked to Stuxnet, a version of the famous virus shared
a module with the spy toolkit.
Frame is considered one of the most complex spy tool produced by
a state sponsored project and its use in the attacks against French government
suggests the existence of a cyber espionage campaign to collect sensible information.
An official declaration coming from spokesmen of the Elysee
Palace and reported by the magazine states:
"Hackers have not only managed to get to the heart of
French political power," "but they were able to search the computers
of close advisers of Nicolas Sarkozy."
Surely the operation has led to the theft of confidential
information regarding the policy of the French government even if it seems not
to have directly involved the President who does not have a personal computer.
"secret notes were recovered from hard drives, and also
strategic plans." reports the article.
The vector used to spread the Malware is the popular social
network Facebook , the hackers shared a link to compromised website that
replicated the Elysee's intranet site gathering also user's credentials.
Flame has infected the PC belonging presidential network which
include of a number of Sarkozy's closest collaborators.
The malicious code has been detected by
the Agency nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information
(Anssi) that immediately has knocked out the network to conduct the proper
analysis and of course the sanitation of the IT infrastructure.
The French government avoided to comment the incident, but in
internet is circulating the news on a possible involvement in the
operation of the United States.
Fonts of the government revealed that the national
infrastructures are steadily under attack, they declared that other two large
scale cyber attacks were discovered in May without providing further info.
