Researchers Uncover Government Spy Tool Used to Hack Telecoms and Belgian Cryptographer

The researchers have no doubt that Regin is a nation-state tool and are calling it the most sophisticated espionage machine uncovered to date—more complex even than the massive Flame platform, uncovered by Kaspersky and Symantec in 2012 and crafted by the same team who created Stuxnet.

“In the world of malware threats, only a few rare examples can truly be considered groundbreaking and almost peerless,” writes Symantec in its report about Regin.

Though no one is willing to speculate on the record about Regin’s source, news reports about the Belgacom and Quisquater hacks pointed a finger at GCHQ and the NSA. Kaspersky confirms that Quisqater was infected with Regin, and other researchers familiar with the Belgacom attack have told WIRED that the description of Regin fits the malware that targeted the telecom, though the malicious files used in that attack were given a different name, based on something investigators found inside the platform’s main file.


Victims are located in multiple countries. Kaspersky has found them in Algeria, Afghanistan, Belgium, Brazil, Fiji, Germany, Iran, India, Malaysia, Syria, Pakistan, Russia and the small Pacific island nation of Kiribati. The majority of victims Symantec has tracked are located in Russia and Saudi Arabia.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/mysteries-of-the-malware-regin/