A Scary New Malware Is Tearing Up The Internet And No One Knows Where It Came From

Sony Pictures

"Careto" is the name of "a sophisticated suite of tools for compromising computers and collecting a wealth of information from them," reports The Washington Post.

Here's how it works.

It sends out emails designed to look as though they were sent legitimately from news sources like The Guardian and others. A population of people end up clicking on a link that takes them to a shady site that scans their computer for vulnerabilities. It works against Windows, OS X and Linux systems, and there may be iOS and Android versions on the way.

Once infected, a computer surrenders pretty much any info the malware wants. It can collect "network traffic, keystrokes, Skype conversations, analyze Wi-Fi traffic, PGP keys, fetch all information from Nokia devices, screen captures and monitor all file operations."

And lest you need a reminder, no one knows where it came from.

If you want to dig into the nitty-gritty of it all, Kaspersky Labs released this extensive report on Careto that gets into a lot of the scarier technical details.