iHned.cz: Spy virus sending data to China appears in CzechRep

Prague, Oct 23 (CTK) - The AdvaICT company has revealed a spy virus sending gigabytes of internal data to Chinese servers in one of its Czech organisations, the IHNED.cz server has reported.

The Czech Republic has become another country after the Middle East and Peru, where this spy programme has appeared.

"This is a civil service organisation, we cannot specify it more," AdvaICT board chairman Pavel Minarik told the server.

The spy programme, which was active in one employee's computer, collected some four GB of data in the organisation's local network a day and sent them to China.

A similar software was detected in Peru in June.

Vladimir Broz, expert in computer security, says the use of harmful programmes by firms or the state to gain a competitive advantage has been on the rise.

"This is a serious problem, among others because organisations still underestimate the threat," Broz told CTK.

He added that this was probably the first similar attack on a domestic civil service organisation, which was highlighted in the media.

In May, two people, from the Kaspersky Labs Russian security agency, uncovered the Flame harmful programme that had infected thousands of computers primarily in Israel, Iran and the Middle East.