back to article MYSTERY programming language found in Duqu

Security researchers are appealing for help after discovering that part of the Duqu Trojan was written in an unknown programming language. Duqu is a sophisticated Trojan reckoned to have been created by the same group behind the infamous Stuxnet worm. While the finely tuned Stuxnet worm was designed to home in on specific …

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  1. Lars Silver badge
    Coat

    What a mystery

    "not written in C++ and it's not compiled with Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008".

    What a mystery there is something else too.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Any of US have a clue?

    No ideas here.

    1. robertsgt40
      Pirate

      Re: Any of US have a clue?

      Yep. Mossad

    2. TRT Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Any of US have a clue?

      The letters are Elvish, but the language is that of Mordor...

    3. georgejmyersjr

      Re: Any of US have a clue?

      Lisping Rexx?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's written in Voynich

    It's existence till now has been a closely guarded secret. The only previous known use of the language was when Jeff Goldberg wrote a quick hack on his PowerBook and uploaded it to the alien mothership. From the little that's known, it supposedly combines the readability of Perl, the speed of JavaScript, and the intuitiveness of Haskell.

    1. 8-{>

      Re: It's written in Voynich

      Would that be Jeff Goldblum?

      1. TheRealRoland
        Happy

        Re: It's written in Voynich

        Or Whoopi Goldblum. Your guess is as good as mine... I liked her in Jurassic Park.

        1. Will Shaw

          Re: It's written in Voynich

          Except for the bit where she ate that lawyer. Terrifying. Just imagine the gastrointestinal problems you could cause by eating a lawyer.

  4. jai

    a misspelling perhaps?

    "Powerful you have become Duqu, the dark side I sense in you."

  5. pieeater3142
    Coat

    Obviously LOLCode

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's O B V I O U S.

    It's written in Thetan.

    1. Elmer Phud

      Re: It's O B V I O U S.

      Thetan eh?

      The manuals must cost a forune - and in several volumes.

      It's all Clear(tm) to me now.

  7. The Jon
    Coat

    Intercal?

    1. mafoo
      Devil

      Bah

      you beat me to it! I take your intercal and I raise you Malbolge!

    2. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Or Befunge

      A 2D programming language. Loops are real loops! Maybe there is a befunge++ out there

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    iron python would be my first stab guess

    ^ ^

    I

    V

  9. Ed 16

    Skynet rises!

  10. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    maybe

    object-oriented assembler? Or, hmm, TurboPascal6? That would be cool.

    1. Spotfist

      Re: maybe

      TurboPascal6, classic!

      Even better would be if it was a ".bat" file lol!

      Echo on!

  11. banjomike
    Thumb Up

    Impressive work...

    both by Kaspersky AND the baddies.

    1. Miek
      Coat

      Re: Impressive work...

      Yeah, but Kaspersky apparently need help with their addition ....

      "The Kaspersky research team has gone some way in unravelling the mystery language used by the Duqu Framework, but still needs addition help."

      Should I get my coat or my pedant's hat? Hmmmm

  12. . 3

    Scheme

    Reminds me about the story of the supposedly biggest ever deployment of the scheme language was an interpreter some poor techie embedded into his employer's toolbar / adware / malware for the express purpose of detecting rival's malware and disabling it. There was such a constant state of flux between the different camps, a lightweight framework for distributing and executing the day's new rules gave them a huge advantage apparently.

    In modern terms though, object orientated and lightweight would suggest Lua. Perhaps the byte code is obfuscated.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: Scheme

      Igor Soumenkov says it's not Lua.

      My money is on some kind of Lisp.

      After all: http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/naughtydog.lhtml

      "With leading edge game systems like ours, you have to deal with complicated behaviors and real-time action. Languages like C are very poor with temporal constructs. C is just very awkward for a project like this. Lisp, on the other hand, is ideal."

      Lateral thoughts: Anyone remember Thierry Breton's "Softwar" Cyberthrilling Cyberpotboiler back from the 80's?

    2. scarshapedstar
      Coffee/keyboard

      Re: Scheme

      Scheme!

      (cons barf (cons puke (cons vomit)))

  13. maccy

    It's Java. Pretty much anything written in Java acts like a virus.

    1. Rob Crawford

      Cant be cos viruses tend to do something

  14. Gordon Fecyk
    WTF?

    So AV firms forgot how to read x86 assembly?

    Like I'm going to trust these guys with protecting my x86 PC given this skill set.

    1. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: So AV firms forgot how to read x86 assembly?

      Probably Power BASIC. It has great network support and generates tighter binaries than anything except possibly assembly.

    2. Dr. Vesselin Bontchev
      Boffin

      Re: So AV firms forgot how to read x86 assembly?

      So, you have forgotten how to read English? "These guys" have no problem reading the x86 disassembly and understanding what the code DOES. What they are wondering is what language it was originally written in and compiled from. It definitely wasn't hand-written x86 assembly.

      From the looks of it, my guess would be one of the relatively less-widely used object-oriented languages. Maybe compiled Pyhton or Forth... Compiled Perl might be worth looking at, although personally I think it's unlikely.

      1. Tchou

        Re: So AV firms forgot how to read x86 assembly?

        Python is written in C.

        It seems very unlikely that a skilled team of programmers relies on a high level programming language made by "average Joe" for a critical piece of code.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Vesselin

        If they knew what it does then why would the language matter ?

        They only seem to know that the code section is used to communicate with the other servers when it has infected a machine. But it sounds to me as if they're not quite sure /how/ it makes it happen.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @Vesselin

          Presumably, the assembly signature is rather abnormal. What's wrong with being curious?

          Also, if this is a hand-rolled language created by the baddies, then spotting other malware created by them based on said signature would become a lot easier.

      3. Gordon Fecyk
        Mushroom

        The point?

        This sort of news does not inspire confidence in an already dubious anti-virus industry, that spends more money on market research than anti-virus research and has to call out to the masses: "Help us find out how this was written."

        What I would do with actual budget figures from a major AV firm. Even without that information, if they spent more money on AV research than market research, we'd have an off-the-shelf profile-based virus product that can catch this sort of thing before it's written, instead of boxes of the same-old after-the-fact garbage with pictures of Iron Man on the front.

      4. Tom 13
        Coat

        Obviously it was written in Forth.

        That way when it came time to implement the plan, all they had to do was type:

        Go Forth and Conquer!

  15. Mike Brown

    of course we cant read it

    its written by an A.I. The net has become self aware, and is looking for ways to pwn us.

    1. TimeMaster T
      Go

      Re: of course we cant read it

      No, it's the Puppetmaster trying to build itself a body.

  16. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Not FORTRAN or COBOL then?

    Realistically, given the likely provenance of these babies, if I was running the project then the first thing I'd do would be write a language specifically for them ... after all, if it's a government project then money isn't going to be a big issue. And a virus^H^H^H^H^H payload specific language would offer significant advantages.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Not FORTRAN or COBOL then?

      > a payload specific language would offer significant advantages.

      But which ones? Why not use libraries + some macro language that you can just pass through ANTLR?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's probably C++

    But written to be parsed right to left ...

    1. MonkeyBot

      Re: It's probably C++

      If it's parsed right to left, does that make it C-- or ++C?

  18. Black Plague
    WTF?

    Remember the rumors that Stuxnet was written by the US military, CIA, etc.?

    Knowing what I know about the history of US Dept of Defense computing, my bet is that it's written in Ada!

    1. Acme Fixer

      Re: Remember the rumors that Stuxnet was written by the US military, CIA, etc.?

      From what little I remember about Ada when I took the class, was that it was not a compiler, not an interpreter, but a translator, which spit out FORTRAN on the IBM 4361. What a joke. One Ada run took 8 minutes to complete and if more than one was running, it was more like 20 minutes.

      I was going to speculate before I read the article. Then I thought, if it's really that obscure, those spooks just want to know if anyone has knowledge about it, so they can interrogate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H question the person about whether or not they had anything to do with writing the actual code (!)

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Childcatcher

        Re: Remember the rumors that Stuxnet was written by the US military, CIA, etc.?

        When was that class you took? Late 80's?

        I'm sure there are pretty good Ada Compilers around now.

        1. bazza Silver badge

          Re: Remember the rumors that Stuxnet was written by the US military, CIA, etc.?

          @Destroy All Monsters: Yes there are! Once ADA runtimes emerged that actually used O/S facilities like threads instead of re-creating those things for themselves, ADA got a *lot* better. From what I vaguely remember, Greenhills ADA on VxWorks was pretty decent indeed.

          I can remember the problems that a bunch of colleagues had in the very early '90s with ADA (on Vax I think). The application they'd written was too large for any of the ADA runtimes of the day to actually run. I never found out if they ever got it going...

      2. h4rm0ny

        Re: Remember the rumors that Stuxnet was written by the US military, CIA, etc.?

        I think you must be going back a long way. I don't know if early Ada was ever implemented as a translator to Fortran, but I'm pretty certain by Ada 95 (when I was learning it), it had its own compiler that did not go via Fortran. I think performance between Ada 95 and Fortran was comparable. In any case, the reason you used Ada wasn't for speed but because its safety features meant your code was "provably" correct. (Just don't mention the Arianne 5 explosion).

        I seriously doubt anyone has written the core of a virus in Ada. Though I would be amused to be proved wrong.

        1. Ralph B
          Big Brother

          > I seriously doubt anyone has written the core of a virus in Ada.

          Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?

  19. Desperate Olive
    Holmes

    Easy

    Brainfuck translated to INTERCAL and then to C++

  20. WhoAmI?
    Devil

    What about...

    MUMPS? That's pretty damn unreadable

    1. Gio Ciampa

      Re: What about...

      Back in the DSM-11 days, maybe... but that was oh so long ago... you'd hardly recognise it now

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There is an obvious answer here.

    VB6.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge

      Re: There is an obvious answer here.

      Nah - gotta be QuickBasic 4.5...

  22. AndrueC Silver badge
    Joke

    It's called assembly language. An ancient and venerable language now nearly extinct.

    1. Andus McCoatover
      Windows

      Assembly?

      Go even lower, if you like.

      I was working on Nicolet 440 Spectrum Analysers, where you'd have to know microcode/machine language. 44 bits/instruction? Doddle.

      The same thing happens in the laptop on a script-kiddie's sofa, but he just don't know it.

      1. Mike Pellatt
        Coat

        Re: Assembly?

        HP2100 assembler, hand-craft into 1's and 0's, then punch it in on the front panel switches.

        That's how I was taught REAL programming by the great Dr Munro, Yr 2, EE at Imperial.

        Time to design a USB-connected proper front panel for the Raspberry PI, then these schoolkids can really learn how a computer works.

        </old-fart>

  23. The Original Cactus
    Paris Hilton

    A layman writes

    How feasible is it that whoever is behind Duqu has created a new programming language to confound the white hats?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How feasible is it?

      Well, it's perfectly feasible, given the obvious level of manpower and resources that were poured into putting together this very professional bit of code, but what's most likely is that they've used some pre-existing (but obscure) language tool that just isn't used very much compared to C and C++ and so the look of the code it generates isn't well known.

    2. Tchou

      Re: A layman writes

      Excuse me but you accidentally mixed "white hats" and "a security firm" in the same sentence, as if they had anything in common.

      1. The Original Cactus
        Facepalm

        Thanks for the correction Tchou

        Oops, so I did. Consider my wrist duly slapped.

    3. AndrueC Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: A layman writes

      It's feasible but not as a tool for generating the machine executable code (which is what most programming boils down to). Any self-respecting investigator is probably just looking at the machine instructions (decoded into assembly language).

      However I can see a mystery high level language being relevant if the payload is an interpreter+script I suppose. Maybe some kind of intermediate p-code a la .NET.

      In that situation when you disassemble it all you'll get is the interpreter/compiler and a load of unknown junk requiring further investigation. It's an interesting idea but a lot of work for a malware author I'd have thought.

      1. Tom 13

        Re: a lot of work for a malware author

        For a malware author (or group of authors) yes, for a bunch of spooks who want to remain unknown, not so much.

    4. Serif

      Re: A layman writes

      It might be quite sensible for them to develop a domain specific language to write their code in. It's a fairly standard technique. It would also hint at the people behind it being reasonably clueful. Maybe a warning about what happens when you have too many bright computer science graduates around without a job.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lunduke

    is the answer

  25. fajensen

    FreeRTOS perhaps.

    To me the code looks pretty similar to what one would get using FreeRTOS. There are not enough push/pops for the newer x86 but ..... they could have been sneaky and compiled the code for 8086.

  26. Mr Young
    Happy

    I feel old now!

    Decades of asm error files myself so I find this high level language stuff really confusing - does it make it easier to do divide routines and indexed addresing - stuff like that? Probably take several people months of disassembly to figure it out - I'd guess if Kaspersky are on it at least us humans have a chance!

  27. dssf

    Why would whomever knows something of it fess up?

    It seems to me that this is some pretty obscure stuff, and whether it's DOD, GRU/Spetsznas, China, North Korea, South Korea, the UK, whomever, it is probably so compartmentalized that the very one who speaks of it gets killed along with the handful or more of people on the team and peripheral to it (a few friends, a few relatives, a line supervisor from a previous division/department...)... So, unless it is some group with a sense of humor, there probably are some deadly serious people behind it.

    That said, it is possible, I imagine, that it is an exercise at seeing how trustworthy a given agency feels its workers are. The longer this work goes uncracked, the likelier the team gets elevated to the real, much more difficult project ahead.

    1. dssf

      Re: Why would whomever knows something of it fess up?

      Request: can someone help me understand why my comment was down-thumbed? I'm not sure if it was a random bot, or if I used some unmentionable key/flagged word, of what. Thx...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Why would whomever knows something of it fess up?

        Someone probably thought you were dissing Apple!

        On topic (and not as a reply really), I support the idea of a self-aware computing power out there. AI wrote it!

      2. Kubla Cant

        Re: Why would whomever knows something of it fess up?

        @dssf:

        You were lucky. A couple of weeks ago I suggested that a man who shot his daughter's laptop might not be acting in a reasonable, moderate way, and I got 59 down-votes!

        Equally mysterious is the fact that your post about the down-vote has itself been down-voted twice. I'm more than a little worried about the votes I'll get for this reply.

      3. Tom 13

        Re: Why would whomever knows something of it fess up?

        I'll guess it's for the bunch of people getting killed off for spilling the beans part. Some trawlers here seem to think that sort of thing only happens in movies.

        Although I will admit The Eiger Sanction uses the method rather successfully.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why would whomever knows something of it fess up?

      Either a bot or someone who behaves like one when it comes to downvoting - I've seen a lot of that.

      All I can think is that you may have gone a little too far in speculating that people who know/reveal the answer are likely to be killed.

      I don't believe it is necessarily the work of any government or spook agency and I'm sure the skills required, though high, are not exclusive to such people (I bet there's enough skill amongst those who comment on this forum to achieve the same).

      However, it is clear that these people are very serious and I for one would not want to speculate too far on their identity/methods. "JustaKOS" is just a pseudonym, not a guarantee of anonymity.

  28. a_mu

    ada / ocam / modula 3

    yep

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: ada / ocam / modula 3

      Modula 3? Surely no one would be that strange...

  29. chris lively

    PHP FTW

    Specifically, it is the version of php used by Facebook wihich is compiled down to assembly.

    This means that the virus started life as a fb app...

  30. h4rm0ny

    Don't know...

    But that incidences of the virus cluster in Iran suggest an Israeli source. It's pretty much accepted in the political community that they've been responsible for the assassinations of Iranian scientists. They have the means, motive and demonstrated willingness.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Don't know...

      That's only what the DID want you to think.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It is obviously...

    written and compiled from Prologue, an AI language, and was written in Israel using a hebrew alphabet

    :)

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Io..... thats pretty customisable.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Heads up people! Here's the code.

    10 print "kaspersky suxx0rz lol"

    20 goto 10

  34. William Higinbotham
    Linux

    ADA, Forth, Assembly, etc.

    Gotta be some cross compiler developement tool.

    The ASCII Guy

    1. blondie101
      Mushroom

      Re: ADA, Forth, Assembly, etc.

      Mono's .NET because it's evil in itself

    2. William Higinbotham
      Mushroom

      Re: ADA, Forth, Assembly, etc.

      Don't Panic - Need to decode using babble fish

      Then have 2 gargle blasters during the end of the universe

      For the code only goes looking for the ultimate answer

      <What was the question?>

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gotta love the Russians

    They are just hardcore...they don't seem to smile much tho.

  36. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    It seems hard to believe that people would roll their own language.

    Lets face there's not exactly a shortage of grossly obscure backwater languages that could be used, some (I imagine) even have quite good network support.

    Given a lot of languages have been mapped onto virtual stack machines (including the internals of some *FORTRAN* compilers) I'd wonder if different languages leave a remnant of their high level structure in the stack activity. FORTH is known for it's low level credentials. And since we're on the subject how about postscript?

    And of course if you want to make sure no one will spot what you're working on there's always whitespace.

    But for proper obscurity I'd go with Enochian.

  37. bazza Silver badge

    How about...

    ...the programming language 'Whitespace'.

    Yes, the source code is just white space characters... All non-whitespace characters are ignored.

    1. Gavin King
      Thumb Up

      Re: How about...

      Blast! You beat me to it.

      Now if I were feeling clever, I'd write a whitespace program into this comment; but I can't really be bothered.

  38. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Waitaminnit

    Who was that kid who write a compiler for BBC BASIC in the early 1980s. Bet it was him wot dun it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Waitaminnit

      No it wasn't me.

      My bet is that it is someone playing about with Go. The current generation of script Virus dev are up with the fashion when it comes to tools and useful networking advances.

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    maybe if the Israelis contracted Italians...

    maybe it was written in Chef?

  40. h4rm0ny

    D.

    I'm going to put my money down. I haven't heard anyone suggest D, yet. But it's comparable to C++ (better, actually), modern and appeals to people who want to be learning new things (but don't want those new things to be Javascript or Python), It has the support you'd need to make a working module on Windows and it's freely and easily available.

    I called it. It's compiled D.

    I shall be posting back quotes of this when they find I'm right.

    1. Displacement Activity

      Re: D.

      They checked D. See the comments on the Kaspersky blog.

  41. shawnfromnh

    Total layman

    OK since they are using windows language in the OS itself it is written left to right. But Muslum countries like Iran have a language that read right to left.

    So what if the readable part is left to right for the win OS BUT the code for the nuclear machines was written right to left SO the program is left to right EXCEPT for the objects which were written right to left and maybe the object part of the code was compiles separately first then added to the readable part.

    So then you would have to decode/read it by decompiling each separately and backwards to each other like mirror images intergrated into each other.

    I likely don't have a clue and apologize directly to the enlightened ones that frequent this sight in advance for having to read my drivel if that is the case. "Covering my ass so any real BOFH's here don't take action upon my lame ass for posting this"

    1. h4rm0ny

      Re: Total layman

      It's never a stupid question if you don't know the answer, so there's no problem in asking. But what you suggest isn't how things work.

      There are two reasons for this. A superficial one and a real one. The superficial one is that the programming languages don't have Right to Left variants. If you run the gcc compiler against some source code, it expects that source code to be the same whatever your native language. That's the superficial reason because you *could* write a parser that read things right to left if you wanted to. It wouldn't be hard. (For all I know, someone could have).

      But there's a real reason why it wouldn't work like this as well. That is that regardless of how a single statement is written, the compiler is likely to render it to the same outputted machine code. So both "return 0;" and our hypothetical ";0 return" are both going to come out of the other side of a compiler as the same thing. That's the job of a compiler - to turn statements into their machine equivalent. Whether you say something in Arabic or in English, the *equivalent* in machine language is going to be the same.

      (Also, I bet this isn't "Muslim". Israeli would be my bet).

      Hope this helps.

  42. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's all a bit odd really

    If you're writing malware for a specific purpose, like crippling centrifuges, you're unlikely to be much troubled by AV software that relies on identity-based detection. Assuming you don't flash your malware around before deploying it for its deadly purpose, no-one will have seen it before - so there won't be any identities available for it (for a few days at least, maybe much longer, but long enough to hit the target).

    However, your Achilles heel is heuristic malware detection. To avoid that, you want to write code that looks as "average" as possible and doesn't stand out from the crowd. So using a custom programming language that no-one else uses is decidedly odd. If the boffins at Kaspersky can design a heuristic to detect that language, then ALL the malware written with it is dead in the water from that point on.

    Even if the language is a standard, but little-used one, it still makes the job of malware detection a lot easier.

    1. Tchou

      Re: It's all a bit odd really

      - Heuristic detection is not based on language pattern but on behavior.

      - For any language, there's always a lot of ways to compile the code to native instructions. That's why there's different compilers out there and not just Microft Visual C++. They all produce different "signature" for a given code.

      More likely than making their own language, they did their own compiler and coded the thing in C, using some libraries (they could have wrote them) that provided object orientation for C.

      It make sense because using a close to hardware language gives you a closer representation of the native code you will get, thus allowing you to shape it at will, and make it harder to read.

      You all think much too abstract.

  43. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Obviously it's written in...

    ...Hebrew.

  44. Muckminded

    Lingo

    I see dead languages.

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Navajo

    The Japanese couldn't decipher it either...

  46. Captain DaFt

    Hm... I wonder why nobody's mentioned FORTH? Is it really that forgotten?

    Modular, extensible, and full of mind warping polish notation!

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Unhappy

      "Hm... I wonder why nobody's mentioned FORTH? "

      They have.

      And Postscript

      And Whitespace.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Joke

        Ah but what about BCPL? Maybe the mismatching closing braces is confusing them :D

        NB:Is that a geeky joke or what - anyone else geddit?

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. M Gale

      Could be worse.

      Multi User Forth.

      : main "Yes really, multi user. Share the insanity!" me @ swap notify ;

  47. T J
    Thumb Up

    Watcomm?

    Or the Gnu win64 compiler? Or indeed any compiler that doesnt have all of that microcrud CRAP bogging it down?

  48. Bradley Hardleigh-Hadderchance
    Big Brother

    Don't worry, it's been solved...

    And I quote:

    "Try the Mossad."

    from whatreallyhappened.com.

    There is a link there to this post.

    Yes, the Mossad.

    It was them, it was.

    Mmm............

  49. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Nah...

    ..it's either Sinclair Basic or BBC MicroB BASIC, just they are too young to notice.

    1. Framitz
      Thumb Up

      Re: Nah...

      It would be funny if it's compiled BASIC... it very well could be!

  50. HeNe
    Holmes

    Wait.

    "So far, the researchers have worked out what the mystery code does, but are still mostly in the dark about the grammar and syntax of the programming language, they said."

    WHY would anyone expect to be able to figure out the grammar and syntax of a higher-level language by looking at the compiled code -- let alone try to do so?

    SEKRIT PS

    SECRET EQ B0,B0 SECRET

    DONE EQ B0,B0 SEKRIT

    1. Displacement Activity

      Re: Wait.

      > WHY would anyone expect to be able to figure out the grammar and syntax of a

      > higher-level language by looking at the compiled code -- let alone try to do so?

      Good question. Read the blog; it explains the answer.

  51. BanjoPaterson
    Paris Hilton

    Perl 6 Ticks All The Boxes...

    0. Obscure;

    1. Not in main use;

    2. Object oriented;

    3. Being developed by a whole bunch of smart people in clandestine manner.

    Paris, because if she developed an OO language it would be obscure too.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Stop

      Also fits Dataflex...

      Does anyone still use it?

    2. Tom 13
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Perl 6 Ticks All The Boxes...

      But I thought Paris was completely object oriented?

  52. Glenn Booth

    No mystery...

    It''s gotta be written in OOK! Stands to reason, dunnit?

  53. darklord
    Devil

    Black helicopters??????

    Smelling a rat as most victims have been in Iran. and trying to be fixed by the russians. Hmm got me wondering, conspiracy.

  54. Displacement Activity
    Black Helicopters

    Why?

    I've got to say, after reading the blog, that these Kaspersky guys are really switched on. Almost makes me regret dumping Kaspersky for MSE.

    But, Soumenkov doesn't give any insight into why this component was written in another language. Everything else was written in C++, so what's different about this bit? It seems to be responsible for network comms. He knows a lot about the structure of the code, but the 2 things that stand out (to me) are that it's very object-oriented, and it's event driven. This isn't a job for a roll-your-own language - it should have been written in C++ as well, if only to make sure that it blended in.

    So, looks to me like the guys who wrote this component have screwed up and left a smoking gun. They used their own in-house or research framework, and someone out there will finger them.

  55. John Styles

    Wow

    I have never seen a post (this one and the Kaspersky one) with so much bizarre complete point missing and answering a complex question asked by people who know what they're doing assuming that plucking some name out of the air at random is helpful.

    Truly the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

    1. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Wow

      You do realize that mentioning the Dunning-Kruger in your post makes your post recursive, don't you?

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Happy

        Re: Wow

        "You do realize that mentioning the Dunning-Kruger in your post makes your post recursive, don't you?"

        Nice.

        I wonder if it would have parsed more easily if he'd put a few braces in there?

  56. Zimmer
    Coat

    Nobody mentioned APL yet ?

    Ok, I will........

    (mine's the one with the special keyboard with the Greek characters on it in the pocket.. ).

  57. mark 63 Silver badge

    source?

    assuming they dont have source and are just looking at binaries then isnt telling what language it was written in a pretty hit n miss process anyway?

    hence the "well it aint MS C++"

  58. Ross K Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Let me get my tinfoil hat...

    ...before I guess that it's Israeli in origin.

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    "Unlike the rest of Duqu, the Duqu Framework is not written in C++ and it's not compiled with Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008."

    I humbly propose that any mission critical machine/device shouldn't be relying on windoze in the first place.

    Lastly, I am dubious to assign some degree of sophistication to an implementation forged from a MS development base. It smacks of sub genius.

  60. Seb123
    FAIL

    Read the damn blog

    Seriously people (most of you). Read the damn blog and at least try to fathom what these guys are doing and the question they are asking before posting inane comments.

    If you don't understand, then rather stick to replacing keyboards and other IT/sys admin type activities.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Read the damn blog

      You're new here, aren't you?

    3. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Coat

      Re: Read the damn blog. NOT C++, Objective C, Java, Python, Ada, Lua

      As the blog author states.

      I'm no better equipped to play CSI:Malware than most of you but I'll note a few things.

      The author makes no mention of *any* kind of development tool ID buried in the DLL. AFAIK this is SOP for *all* commercial tools and most open source stuff. So this *looks* like some kind of in house one site compiler. No ID string because in the event of a bug you just go down the hall and have a word.

      This is not unknown in big companies. McDonald Douglas IT arm used an in house language as did Rockwell Collins avionics systems (and ran on their own stack based *processor* to boot).

      This feels like some weird joint venture between 2 teams, 1 COTS, 1more secretive and very bespoke.

      The payload itself sounds more like an OS in it's own right. Message queues, call back functions etc. Is this SOP for malware? I dimly recall a fair bit of this is built into Windows (although who actually *uses* the Background Intelligent Transfer Service apart from Windows Update is a mystery to me).

      Was anyone thinking about Sybian and OPL? I've no frame of reference but it just seems *excessive* somehow. And Symbian was open sourced for download and also made extensive use of callback functions for low power and fast response to events.

      Back in the day a UK company wanted to be the next big thing with a parallel OS they called "Helios" (Written up by Dick Pountain in Byte). The designers had games backgrounds so it was very light weight but lots of OO support. Not an HLL but (IIRC) mostly assembler with *lots* of macros to give a (mostly) consistent handling of objects without overhead. AFAIK they moved into set top boxes.

      The comment about methods being able to be called through a table but also *directly* put me in mind of them. Follow the rules for consistency but if necessary call functions directly for speed. Or maybe they are just the rough edges of an in house development effort.

      This stuff about low resource use and fast response would seem to be pretty much *irrelevant*

      with modern PC's but highly relevant for something for embedded use. Yet it's also *tightly* coupled to the Windows API.

      Some kind of big code base hosted on something else *before* being ported to Windows?

      This looks to be *so* unique that tracing the environment will pretty much find the developers, but I wonder if some of the developers even *realize* how their language has been used.

      My names not Goff, but I am off.

  61. Steve Ives
    Facepalm

    The virus was...

    ...the Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, injected via an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.

  62. Dan Paul
    Boffin

    SCADA system code is entirely proprietary

    In order to lock in customers for programmable logic controllers (PLC) used in SCADA systems, the operating code for the PLC is usually very proprietary and frequently very compactly compiled to make use of the minimal memory.

    Back in the earliest days of PLC's, there was negligible memory to use, perhaps up to 16kb. One Meg would have been a luxury.

    This type of programmer knew how to write code to run on ancient processors that was reliable enough to launch missles and run nuclear plants and yet way more efficiently written than most anything today.

    Who is to say that one of these guys did not come out of retirement to write this mystery section of the code?

    What they did back then could be completely unrecognizable today.

    1. Tom 13

      Re: SCADA system code is entirely proprietary

      Good points. Not only unrecognizable, but perhaps also useless as ID tool. If each one is done as a one off, the trackers wind up wasting resources chasing ghosts.

  63. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    check for signs of

    Check for Aida syntax, it's old and obscure enough.

    Or anyone with skills should be able to decipher the executable code regardless of what programming language was used.

    I have no respect for the clowns asking for help, they mostly seem full of themselves and horseshit.

    1. Tchou

      Re: check for signs of

      Are you allright?

  64. Boris Winkle
    Coat

    It's a very old language now

    But it was a young one when I heard it..

    Footumch

  65. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Meh

    And it does not use the Common Language Runtime.

    So any of the .Net (except C++?)languages are out

    As for it being one or more old SCADA developers most SCADA systems operate as real time control systems. Historically they have used various graphical tools to encode something called relay ladder logic. Guess how long that's been around for.

    By the time SCADA systems were dealing with anything as complex as Ethernet or TCP/IP those functions would be delivered as a function call in the RLL language probably implemented as compiled C function on a mainstream microcontroller or microprocessor.

    SCADA processors tended to be hard coded TTL systems. With TTL clocking up to 35Mhz at a time when SoA processors like the Z80 and 8086 were hitting 4Mhz. The production volumes (100s to 1000s, not millions) plus the performance still made discrete or MSI logic viable.

    Porting a SCADA internal language makes zero sense, but then neither does the different language idea (unless you *already* have one lying around and you're familiar with it).

    Helios update. I mentioned that it was mostly macro assembler but that was my memory of the Byte article. Checking further I've found compilers were listed as being available to support Modula 2, FORTRAN and C/C++. I've no idea which were delivered however.

    So is there *anything* that can be done *easily* in language X that's a PITA in C++ ? That would be the only *real* justification for using it . It's the old joke about if you've got basically an AI problem how much of LISP will you have to implement (in any language you have available) to solve it, because that's what you're going to use in the end.

  66. dhcp pump
    Holmes

    Most likely written and compiled on with the same proprietary platform that the siemens drive software is written,assembler derivative ,so that any other payloads which the av vendor,i doubt the av vendor knows what the payload is ,unless they have a lab full of siemens drives and controllers and the closed source code they are trying to work out .

    Read proprietary compiler /;..and where did the authors get that from ? ,reeks of .

    As with symantec the source is the key ,and if the av vendors have the source ,or they are playing dumb ?and have the source .....

  67. Escovado
    Trollface

    Apple II Forever.

    It's probably written in compiled Applesoft BASIC.

  68. John Smith 19 Gold badge

    Keep in mind the *processor* is Intel, *whatever* the language turns out to be.

    It's generating code for an Intel instruction set.

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