Another State Sponsored Virus targets Lebanon

 'Carl Friedrich Gauss'

"... The researchers said the target banks included several of Lebanon’s largest — the Bank of Beirut, Blom Bank, Byblos Bank and Credit Libanais — along with Citibank and the online payment system PayPal.“We have never seen any malware target such a specific range of banks,” Costin Raiu, Kaspersky’s director of global research and analysis, said in an interview. “Generally, cybercriminals target as many banks as possible to maximize financial profit, but this is a very focused cyberespionage campaign targeting certain users of online banking systems.”
Lebanon experts said that an American cyber espionage campaign directed at Lebanon’s banking system would seem to be a plausible possibility, given Washington’s concerns that the country’s banks are being used as a financial conduit for the Syrian government and for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political party.
“The United States has had a number of Lebanese banks under the microscope for a while,” said Bilal Y. Saab, a Lebanon expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who said the banks “operate much like Swiss banks” in terms of secrecy. “A computer virus could completely undermine that,” he said...."