Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk.
The original Duqu shared coding with — and was written on the same platform as — Stuxnet, the computer worm that partially disabled enrichment centrifuges in Iranian nuclear power plants, according to a 2012 report in The New York Times. Intelligence and military experts said that Stuxnet was first tested at Dimona, a nuclear-reactor complex in the Negev desert that houses Israel’s own clandestine nuclear weapons program. While Stuxnet is widely believed to have been a joint Israeli-U.S. operation, Israel seems to have developed and implemented Duqu on its own.
Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 12"Vanity URLs (aka personal URLs) are a staple on nearly all social networks. The ability to personalize a URL for your profile makes it easier to share it with others. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and most other social sites offer them. However, if you're on Google+ your profile is identified by a big string of numbers that follow the plus.google.com URL like this: https://plus.google.com/112915508949553064969. Today we'll look at nine ways you can get a Google+ vanity URL (and the one you might already have). Almost every method of getting a vanity URL requires that you know your Google+ ID; that long string of numbers that identifies you. So you're first step is to figure out what ID you've been assigned. Either open up Google+ and go to your profile page, or go to https://plus.google.com/u/0/me and you'll be taken right there (provided you haven't logged out of Google+). In your browsers address bar is the URL for Google+ followed by your ID so copy that onto your clipboard or write it down and then we'll explore the ways you can create a vanity URL."
