Quote from: Fallkniven on May 16, 2013, 11:00 pmI'm curious to know if the more popular anti-virus or anti-malware programs can detect this government malware running in a Windows environment?The short answer is no.The long answer is maybe. See, the problem is that when you scan for viruses on your computer, basically all you're doing is comparing files (both on the hard disk and in memory) against a list of known virus signatures. That's why you have to keep updating your antivirus definitions (that's what the definitions are, fingerprints of known viruses). There are also other ways of detecting viruses, but the problem is that they don't work very well. Like, not very well at all, actually, so for the most part antivirus programs either don't make use of them or tune the algorithms so far to one side of the scale to avoid accidentally detecting a virus in the operating system kernel or something that they basically don't work at all.That's what the "heuristic scanning," option in some antivirus programs is actually doing. Trying to detect new or unknown viruses by comparing programs against very common behavior of viruses/malware and stuff like that. This is actually why zero day exploits are so catastrophic: they're undetectable, basically. You could have a dozen monitoring your entire system right now, and every antivirus program out there that isn't aware of those specific attacks/programs/viruses would say your system is 100% clean.