GReATʼs researchers receiving the Péter Szőr Award.

The Moscow-based company received the award for revealing “ShadowPad,” a backdoor in software used by hundreds of companies worldwide for handling servers.

GReATʼs members found that the malicious module sends DNS queries every eight hours to certain domains, containing the basic information of the infected system. If the attackers found the system valuable based on the information, the commanding server answered and activated a platform through the backdoor which installed itself unnoticed. Following this, the attackers were able to command the platform to download and run further malicious codes. The team believes the attack originates from China.

The award is named after Péter Szőr, a Hungarian computer virus researcher. He was also an advisory board member of Virus Bulletin until his untimely death in 2013. A year later, Virus Bulletin set up the annual Péter Szőr Award, honoring the best piece of technical security research published each year.

GReAT was established in 2008 to investigate cybersecurity threats and other work by malware operations.