Kaspersky has published a flabbergasting report, revealing the presence of a lethal malware, that is residing on firmware of millions external hard drives in Pakistan, China, Russia and Afghanistan. The report stopped just short of claiming this to be yet another job of US intelligence agencies and said that upon analysis of the malware, a striking similarity with the techniques used by NSA and other US intelligence agencies was spotted.
Kaspersky says that such a sophisticated, meticulously crafted attack has never been implemented in the history. The report claims that this is the job of the most advanced cyberespionage group ‘The Equation’.
The malware works in a two-pronged fashion; it creates 1MB sectors in a hard drive, which can never be detected. Once it gets active in the firmware, it can only be accessed by API. The report says that the lethal malware cannot be deleted by antivirus scans, formatting or any sorts of common techniques.
Experts have dubbed this malware as ‘Fanny. Sources claim that Fanny is completely in resemblance with Stuxnet, a malware designed by Israeli and US intelligence agencies to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program.
Fanny worm is reported to be active in millions of external hard drives and USBs in the countries which are known to be hostile to the US, like Russia and China. Pakistan is also on the list of affected countries. Kaspersky says that Fanny malware targeted external hard drives of almost all famous companies including Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba and Hitachi.
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