What is Red October?

If you haven't heard yet, this latest malware campaign has been quite the hot security topic the last two days. Dubbed Operation Red October, it's a massive espionage campaign that has infected computers in the U.S, Russia, and Iran, and is targeting high-level organizations in at least 39 countries.
 

(Source: ARS Technica)
 
 The latest? The giant campaign relied on none other than a Java exploit to infect the PC's. From the ARS technica article:
 
Attackers behind a massive espionage malware campaign that went undetected for five years relied in part on a vulnerability in the widely deployed java software framework to ensnare their victims....They used highly targeted malware to collect what's believed to be hundreds of terabytes of sensitive data...
 
So what does this mean for Webroot users?

 
Due to the fact that Red October isn't a single infection (or even a classified family of malware), but rather a combination of a variety of malicious software using different exploits to gain access to its targets' computers, Webroot (nor any other security vendor) can provide 100% protection for it. That said, if the cybercriminals suddenly decided to target a wider audience (i.e the average consumer), they would lose their most important advantage-being able to tailor the attacks to specific targets. With that gone, stopping the attacks on a larger scale, would be much easier.

 
In the meantime, with Webroot SecureAnywhere, we will continue to provide our users with the most comprehensive protection and respond as quickly as possible to new vulnerabilities and malware. In this regard, we have a significant advantage as we can respond to these aforementioned threats very quickly due to SecureAnywhere's unique approach-the ability for us to respond instantly to new threats is something that makes us truly unique.