Meet Snake, Perseus and Uroboros: A Lesson In Cryptography

Why do I love working in cybersecurity? Well, every single day brings a new puzzle to solve, and every day I have to bring together skills of coding, cryptography and networking to understand and solve new puzzles. And, so the release of news of the disabling some malware provides a new puzzle to understand, and it's one where sophisticated code is let down by some novice mistakes. And, when I say novice, I mean that I would not even expect an undergraduate student to implement such trivally cracked code.

Meet Snake, Uroboros and Turla

This week the FBI announced that they had disabled some stealthy malware — Snake —and then uploaded a payload to disable it. This malware has been used for over a decade and which often focused on nation-state activity.

Snake — thought to have been created in 2003 — grew from the Uroboros malware. If you are interested, Uroboros comes from the ancient symbol that represented a serpent eating its own tail. In fact, a low-resolution image of Uroboros was — at one time — used as a backdoor into the Turla malware platform.

Overall, Snake manages to run on most types of operating systems and is highly modular in building targeted code. A typical exploit allows Snake to install the Turla malware platform onto an infected…