Windows 7: Researchers Lift Lid on Government-Distributed Cyber-Spy Trojans

Late in July, pro-democracy activists, security researchers and journalists from Bloomberg News collaborated to uncover details about a mysterious piece of malware known as FinFisher, which proved to be spyware made by U.K. company Gamma International and sold to government clients.

Working from executables encountered by pro-democracy activists, computer scientists and researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab reverse engineered part of the software and found telltales signs that linked it to the U.K. firm.



Others took up the investigations and discovered that the use of FinFisher went far beyond spying on Bahraini activists. On Aug. 8, a researcher from security firm Rapid7 published his own analysis of the software, finding that servers in 10 countries, including the United States, Australia and Indonesia, showed signs of hosting the software needed to manage systems compromised with the espionage Trojan.