If you are Lebanese, you have by now heard about a malware or cyber espionnage tool called Gauss, spreading mostly in Lebanon and discovered by Kaspersky Lab.

There could be more infections, but those are the numbers reported by Kaspersky.

Your must read articles are the ones on Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab Discovers ‘Gauss’ – A New Complex Cyber-Threat Designed to Monitor Online Banking Accounts) and Wired (Flame and Stuxnet Cousin Targets Lebanese Bank Customers, Carries Mysterious Payload)

Also if you happen to know 2 or 3 things about computers – you can check this 48 pages pdf by kaspersky – it contains the Juicy tech details like Infection stats, Operating systems stats, architecture, comparison with Flame, how it installs and operates, Timeline, Filelist and an excellent executive summary and conclusion.

While at it, you can also check the wiki page of Gauss, the math dude, pretty impressive man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss

Why the buzz

a while back, I was looking for a list of Lebanese cities and villages to use while building an application.

The most useful thing i could find was on http://www.lebanon.cd/Lebanese-cities.htm – It is a nice list of 1100+ cities/villages arranged by district and area.

However the above exists in the form of HTML – not raw data… in other words, it is not easily re-usable.
After a few scripts, I turned the html into a public google fusion table findable in search and all.

Here is a link to the fusion table datasource https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1rxUVz_3qeOVPmN_kPCHumsQ_crEFyzCbrvPU28A (easy to use stuff – just click the link)

If you are not familiar with Fusion tables, here is a CSV for you to download.

Hope that turns out useful – more open data to come!