PUNTA CANA, Dominican Republic -- Kaspersky’s security research team revealed "one of the most advanced" cyber-espionage malware threats “The Mask” (aka Careto) at the 2014 Security Analyst Summit this week.

See:  Washington Post, Guardian links used to infect The Mask malware victims

ZDNet attended Kaspersky's presentation of "Behind the Mask" -- our photos of the presentation and its slides offer more details about the malware.

Slides of the presentation have not yet been published online.

IOC information about The Mask is in Kaspersky's research paper.

The malware's primary targets are government institutions, diplomatic offices and embassies, energy, oil and gas companies, research institutions, private equity firms and high-profile activists.

The researchers specifically named The Mask's phishing bait as "The Guardian" and "Washington Post" links sent in targeted emails.

The Mask collects a large list of documents from the infected system, including encryption keys, VPN configurations, SSH keys and RDP files.

There are also several unknown extensions being monitored that Kaspersky has not been able to identify and said "could be related to custom military/government-level encryption tools."

The researchers said, "At the moment, all known Careto command and control servers are offline. The campaign was active [from 2007] until January 2014, but during our investigations the C&C servers were shut down."

Kaspersky added that the malware's most active year for variants was 2012 in its official Mask FAQ, published after the presentation and announcements, at the end of conference day one.

More: Infographic: The Mask malware victims

PUNTA CANA, Dominican Republic -- Kaspersky’s security research team revealed "one of the most advanced" cyber-espionage malware threats “The Mask” (aka Careto) at the 2014 Security Analyst Summit this week.

See:  Washington Post, Guardian links used to infect The Mask malware victims

ZDNet attended Kaspersky's presentation of "Behind the Mask" -- our photos of the presentation and its slides offer more details about the malware.

Slides of the presentation have not yet been published online.

IOC information about The Mask is in Kaspersky's research paper.

The malware's primary targets are government institutions, diplomatic offices and embassies, energy, oil and gas companies, research institutions, private equity firms and high-profile activists.

The researchers specifically named The Mask's phishing bait as "The Guardian" and "Washington Post" links sent in targeted emails.

The Mask collects a large list of documents from the infected system, including encryption keys, VPN configurations, SSH keys and RDP files.

There are also several unknown extensions being monitored that Kaspersky has not been able to identify and said "could be related to custom military/government-level encryption tools."

The researchers said, "At the moment, all known Careto command and control servers are offline. The campaign was active [from 2007] until January 2014, but during our investigations the C&C servers were shut down."

Kaspersky added that the malware's most active year for variants was 2012 in its official Mask FAQ, published after the presentation and announcements, at the end of conference day one.

More: Infographic: The Mask malware victims