Solving "Gauss"

By: Suzanne Kelly, CNN

Researchers at the same cybersecurity lab that announced the discovery of the Flame virus this past May believe they have discovered a related set of code that serves as a Trojan horse, and they're asking the wider cryptographic community to help them crack it.

The newly found code dubbed "Gauss" appears to be a cyber-espionage toolkit that has the ability to intercept passwords, steal computer system configuration information and access credential information for banks located in the Middle East. But researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Russia say things don't seem to be only as they appear.

"We're talking about a complex package," says senior security researcher Kurt Baumgartner, who says the code appears to be created by a nation-state. "It's unique and different in a few ways; it maintains code and has similar functionality to Flame and Stuxnet."

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