Hackers infect computers with malware

BoSToN: In a sophisticated targeted espionage operation, hackers infected tens of thousands of computers from the Taiwanese vendor Asus with malicious software using the company’s online automatic update service, security researchers reported.

Kaspersky Lab said it detected 57,000 infections among customers of its anti-virus software. It estimates that the exploit likely affected more than one million computers from the world’s No. 5 computer company .

The malware was designed to open a “backdoor” for intruders in the infected machines, researchers said.

About 50% of the affected Kaspersky anti-virus software customers were in Russia, Germany and France, the company said . The US accounted for less than 5%.

A Symantec spokesman said about 13,000 of its anti-virus customers received the malicious updates. The so-called supply-chain attack was first reported by the online news site Motherboard.

Kaspersky said the infected software was on Asus’ Live Update servers from June to November and was signed with legitimate certificates.

It did not detect the malware until January, when new capabilities were added to its anti-virus software, the company said.

Kaspersky said its researchers determined that the malware was programmed for surgical espionage when they saw that it was designed to accept a second malware payload for specific computers based on unique identifiers of their network connections.