The efforts to bring about full control of the free internet are about to receive another jolt, as a new cyber bug known as Gauss is fast spreading around the world collecting information from banking institutions, commercial transactions and other data.

Gauss was discovered by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based computer security firm. According to its workers, Gauss is from the same making as Stuxnet and Flame, two computers viruses launched by the US and Israel to disrupt Internet services, especially in the Middle East.

Gauss is then a new form of cyber false-flag launched by governments that have an interest in kidnapping the web to make it of their own while curtailing access and free speech. The virus has been targeting banks, social networks and e-commerce, among others. It has been stealing login and password information as well as email and instant messaging data.

Gauss’s actions have been felt more strongly in the Middle East, in countries such as Lebanon, while in the West, the virus attacked computers at CitiGroup Inc.’s and Paypal. The specificity of the attacks already has many people buzzing about whether this virus could be used to create glitches that would cause a financial disaster, something of the kind seen in Wall Street, where financial transactions were affected by a ‘malfunction’ which caused great pain to investors. No need to emphasize that Wall Street is also connected to the World Wide Web, and that any strong attack on financial business could at the very least shut down the exchange.