Endpoint Protection . The Trojan.Hydraq Incident . It has been about a week since news of the mysterious Hydraq Trojan (also known as Aurora) attack broke with the unveiling of a threat by Google to pull its operations out of China. Although concrete details of the attacks are not yet public, Google made reference to a number of Gmail accounts that were compromised during or after the attacks. Anatomy of the Attack For a number of years targeted attacks have nearly always followed the same modus operandi. In the more sophisticated attacks, the attacker will use a new zero day vulnerability, as obviously this will have a greater success rate. In this attack a PDF file was used to exploit the Adobe Acrobat, Reader, and Flash Player Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862/BID35759). This PDF installed a Trojan horse which was an earlier version of the current Trojan.Hydraq. This means the remote attacker has the ability to see in real time any user interface activity as if they were sitting right next to the user. As described in the previously posted blog (Hydraq - An Attack of Mythical Proportions), an unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability (BID 37815) was used as one of the propagation vectors for this particular Trojan.Hydraq attack. This security hole allows remote exploitation, which means that attackers can run any malicious code of their liking on a victim’s machine by taking advantage of the vulnerability. The number of computers we have observed being attacked or have been attacked is low as borne out by our field detection statistics. Prevention &amp; Mitigation Trojan.Hydraq has been known to be spread through specially crafted PDF files and also through malicious Web sites