APT developers not as smart as they’re made out to be

Criminal hackers aren’t as smart as those portrayed in the movies and on TV, according to a new report from Sophos Ltd. — but those behind advanced persistent threats are even dumber.

To measure hackers intelligence, SophosLabs’ principal researcher Gabor Szappanos picked a particular exploit that went after a vulnerability in Microsoft Office. The exploit only targeted a specific version of Microsoft Office, but could have been modified to infect other versions, as well.

Then he looked at 70 different examples of malware that used this exploit, from a wide range of authors in both advanced persistent threat groups and common commercial families, and evaluated their programming skills.

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Story added 4. February 2015, content source with full text you can find at link above.