Flame Malware: A Profane Open Rant to ‘Tech Journalists’

So the latest fad-craze of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, seems to be the Flame Malware, which ‘journalists’ have now relegated to ‘just a piece of gamer code’. Just a few days ago, it was the ‘biggest worm since Stuxnet’, and it ‘could take Kaspersky Labs YEARS to decipher it, OMG’!

“It took us half-a-year to analyze Stuxnet,” he said. “This is 20 times more complicated. It will take us 10 years to fully understand everything.”-Alexander Gostev – Kaspersky

Do you own an Iranian Nuclear facility? No? Then why the fuck are you even mentioning Stuxnet? Is it because you heard the word “Malware” and then a reference to some middle-eastern country, and had the urge to vomit the first word that came to mind?  

Let’s not forget that Kaspersky Labs was taking it up the butt this time last year from a myriad of  reasons, among the more publicized, they got taken to task by a single amateur hacker because the people who want you to pay them to secure your shit can’t even secure their own shit. The attacker was able to inject unchecked code, which ended up distributing malware , yet they were CLUELESS how the attack even took place. It is no surprise it will take Kaspersky 10 years to figure it out; it seems that they are 10 years behind everything. Wasn’t there a HNNCast episode about this?

 

And this is the “Source” that the media ran to the bank with. Shame on Kaspersky, shame on ‘tech-journalists’ and shame on you, public-at-large for eating that shit up. Nobody bothered to read the CrySys PDF analysis on it which would have soothed a lot of fears about it being the next big digital holocaust that the media would love you to think it is.  The only people all of this uproar benefits are the ass-hats at Kaspersky Labs for the free publicity.

 

If you call yourself a tech-journalist, then at least know what you are talking about, and a bit about the ground you are standing on. PART of Flame was written with LUA. LUA is a part of MANY things. Lipstick is PART whale blubber, but does that mean you are dragging a dead orca across your lips before you kiss your editor’s ass? I guess repeating the same headline about it gets old after a while, so they have taken to bashing the malware calling it “Just gamer code” because some genius mentioned that Angry Birds was written in LUA.

 

It wasn’t ‘just gamer code’ when you were knee-deep in alarm a week ago, describing how big the chunks from the sky were as they fell.

 

There are so many circlejerk journalists in the tech industry right now it is sickening. Little to no knowledge of the field, and content to take someone’s word as golden if they are in the remotest position of authority. What happened to fact checking? what happened to knowing your subject matter?  What happened to making someone grind it out in the mail-room for a few years before you hand them a brand new Macbook Pro and a tech-column?

 

How about doing the rest of us a favor, and just keep your paraphrased, non-fact-checked, garbage-ass articles to yourself. The rest of us who have been in the trenches for 20+ years would appreciate the pageviews.