If you haven’t heard of it, look up the Regin malware, its a very interesting.  I’m no expert but from reaidng around the internets, I’ve made the following notes.  It seems to be the most advance malware to grace the world thus far, and not just by a bit but by a long shot.  From what I’ve read online, its more of a malicious system or data acquisition suite than malicious software! Completely modular, it can hide its components in various places, is encrypted and will use ports which make indistinguishable from a tracking cooking among other things. Completely inviable, untraceable, and leaving no footprint, it can can disappear without a trace, in fact it seems to have been in the wild for 5 or 6 years without anybody knowing what it was.   This situation makes me think of a future, where a large distributed OS could live in the registries, extra disc space and idle computing power of a large number of PCs without being seen or known.  It reminds me of the end of Neuromancer, (Spoiler Ahead) when Winter Mute finally escapes from his confinement or perhaps this is the obvious evolution of an XKCD style virus aquarium, one of the specamine simply escaped the tank (its a joke, look it up).  At any rate, perhaps more exciting is the prospect of using this sort of distributed data acquisition for good in the future through the Internet of things or home automation, who knows, the future of technology is rather scary, but in equal parts exciting.

I’m no expert, feel free to read more from my sources…

VIrus Aquarium : http://xkcd.com/350/

General Info : http://www.cnet.com/news/advanced-regin-malware-poses-biggest-threat-outside-us/

Podcast Media Info : Security Now : Episode 483 https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

General Info : http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/regin-top-tier-espionage-tool-enables-stealthy-surveillance