'Red October' cyber-attack found by Russian researchers

A major cyber-attack that may have been stealing confidential documents since 2007 has been discovered by Russian researchers.

Kaspersky Labs told the BBC the malware targeted government institutions such as embassies, nuclear research centres and oil and gas institutes.

It was designed to steal encrypted files - and was even able to recover files that had been deleted.

One expert described the attack find as "very significant".

"It appears to be trying to suck up all the usual things - word documents, PDFs, all the things you'd expect," said Prof Alan Woodward, from the University of Surrey.

"But a couple of the file extensions it's going after are very specific encrypted files."