Well it most certainly is NOT. According to security firm Symantec, Duqu is a pre-cursor to the next Stuxnet virus. That could mean big trouble in government and industrial security-land. In a message released yesterday, the company revealed that Duqu code hade been found in a handful of European industrial control companies. The program is a kind of scout that hackers send in to find vulnerabilities in a system, log keystrokes, and steal passwords. After a successful scout mission, a Stuxnet-like virus can then be deployed. Researchers at Symantec are pretty confident that whomever launched Duqu has first hand knowledge and access to Stuxnet because some of the programming language is identical. Duqu is so covert that it’s programmed to snoop around for 36 days then remove itself, so there’s actually no telling how many systems may have been affected.
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