Shady Rat Attacks Hit 70 Organizations, 14 Countries

Shady Rat Attacks Hit 70 Organizations, 14 Countries

www.informationweek.com

A massive advanced persistent threat (APT)-type attack campaign has been ongoing worldwide for five years that has stolen intellectual property from 70 government agencies, international corporations, nonprofits, and others in 14 countries, according to a new published report in Vanity Fair.
The so-called "Operation Shady Rat," which is detailed in a new report by McAfee, has mostly U.S.-based organizations and government agencies (49 of the 70 victims), but government agencies in Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Canada are among its victims, as are organizations in Japan, Switzerland, the

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.vanityfair.com
venturebeat.com
www.washingtonpost.com

5 years running undetected! Over 70 organizations in 14 countries. This is not just hacking, this is full fledged cyber warfare.

The economic and security damage caused by this breach (or series of breaches) in completely unprecedented.

A while back the DoD reported that attacks on the cyber battlefield could be met with responses on the physical battlefield.

I think this story is something to keep your eyes on for the next few weeks. Listen to the rhetoric and saber rattling to come....

www.informationweek.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

All it means is the internet will no longer be anon.

it will be patrolled and we will all be known.

next step is bar coding or chipping/implants of humans

refusal will be death

reply to post by BomSquad


The Hong Kong blondes were behind this.

Some additional information...

(Reuters) - Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

State actor seen behind "enormous" wave of cyber attacks

I really dont see any problems with this. When will the govts realize there ARE no secrets, that ALL information eventually becomes public.

If the govts of the world werent engaged in illegal, shady or downright inhuman deeds then they'd have nothing to worry about right?

My question is why does the govt get its panties all bunched up when THEY are the victims of unwarranted surveillance yet they all think its ok to watch every move we do, push us through body scanners and set up new cameras at every street corner. Payback's a bitch, govts of the world, and this is just the beginning. Wait until we the soccer moms get REALLY pissed.

Not sure how much I believe it was China. If it was these countries are now under China's control through blackmail. You can't really try an entire country for blackmail against another country can you now?

Originally posted by doctornamtab
You can't really try an entire country for blackmail against another country can you now?

Yeah, it's that old thing called War.

Kinda makes anything Anonymous does now look like aiding and abetting the enemy doesn't it? Using up investigative resources on homegrown cyber punks instead of state terrorists.
Would be interesting if any collusion turns up, because we all been told "anyone can be Anonymous" which includes China.

this is all over the news right now.

I'm guessing McAfee has a new product about to launch.

reply to post by doctornamtab


This is not just governments spying on other governments. This is also industrial espionage on an unprecedented scale.

An excerpt from one of the sources in the original post...

“What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth,” McAfee’s vice president of threat research Dmitri Alperovitch, said in a blog post today.

He said the losses include closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA (industrial computing machinery) configurations, design schematics and “much more has fallen off the truck of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.”

He added, “What is happening to all this data — by now reaching petabytes as a whole — is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth in a suddenly more competitive landscape and the loss of jobs in industries that lose out to unscrupulous competitors in another part of the world, not to mention the national security impact of the loss of sensitive intelligence or defense information.”

Some additional information...

Security Firm Says It Found Global Cyberspying

SHANGHAI — An American cybersecurity company issued a report on Wednesday saying it had identified cyberattacks that lasted up to five years on a wide range of governments, American corporations and even United Nations groups.

The company, McAfee, said it had alerted the 72 targets it identified and also informed law enforcement agencies, which it said were investigating. The 14-page report calls the attacks highly sophisticated and says they appear to have been operated by a government body, which it declined to name.

“We’re not pointing fingers at anyone but we believe it was a nation-state,” Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president of threat research and the lead author of the report, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. China has repeatedly been the focus of suspicion in such cases.

Another interesting development. Now they are accusing China (or at least Chinese people) directly of involvement in the 5 year cyber hacking operation...

China-based hackers spent five years ransacking the computer networks of the United Nations, multinational corporations, the Olympic committees of several countries and the U.S. and Canadian governments, according to two security companies.
In one of the largest cyberattacks discovered, more than 72 organizations were hacked by spies beginning in 2006, according to computer server logs and other evidence obtained by Santa Clara, California-based McAfee Inc. (MFE)
The attack has been traced to servers in at least two of China’s major cities, Beijing and Shanghai, according to Atlanta-based Dell SecureWorks, which separately traced the same series of attacks.

Hackers in China Attack UN, Olympic Networks, Security Firms Say in Report

No, I don't believe this.

I believe it's been rediscovered, not discovered.
I remember things. Alarms that were raised and then....quiet.
And when that happens in the cyber security world, people exhale.
Oh, it's nothing false alarm.

Or not.