Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware To Angry Birds 188
eldavojohn writes "The title of this hard-hitting piece of journalism reads 'Powerful 'Flame' cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game,' and opens with, 'The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News — the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.' The rest of the details that are actually pertinent to the story follow that important message. The graphic for this story? Perhaps a map of Iran, or the LUA logo, or maybe the stereotyped evil hacker in a ski mask? Nope, all Angry Birds. Describing LUA as 'Gamer Code,' Fox for some reason (popularity?) selects Angry Birds from an insanely long list in their article implying guilt-by-shared-development-language. I'm not sure if explaining machine language to them would alleviate the perceived problem or cause them to burn their desktops in the streets and launch a new crusade to protect the children."
Yeah, and? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Washington Post wrote a similar piece yesterday that I read. Headline was less direct but linked it in the first paragraph.
As did a number of other sources.
So, how does this apply only to Fox?
Re:Next up... (Score:5, Interesting)
"The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News -- the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.
LUA is favored by game programmers because it’s easy to use and easy to embed. Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons. Yet it was built with gamer code, said Cedric Leighton, a retired Air Force Intelligence officer who now consults in the national security arena.
“The people who developed the malware found an ingenious way to use a code not part and parcel of a hacker’s normal arsenal, and that made it harder to detect,” he told Fox News.
It goes on like that. I hate to say anything nice about Fox News, but this is actually a well-written and informative piece of journalism. The problem is the title of the article, which is idiotic and sensationalistic. Given that the article itself is a decent piece of work and the title seems like it was written by someone who likes to stick crayons up their nose, my guess is that the writer did a careful job on the piece and their editor wanted a title that would get people's attention, and changed the title. Of course, given that we're all discussing the article now, a cynic could argue that this was the right call...