RandomGuy
08-03-2011, 11:51 AM
I am far less worried about the Chinese military, than I am about shit like this. There is some ambiguity about who exactly they are talking about, but the indications all point directly to China.
If you aren't concerned about this, you should be.
There is a reason that part of our recent defense doctrine has directly equated cyberattacks to physical attacks, and allowed for the "full range" of military responses to such attacks. I will see if I can find that NPR story and link it in a later edit to this post.
----------------------------------------------------
BOSTON (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.
The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.
In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of its secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.
"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report released on Wednesday.
"What is happening to all this data ... 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."
McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this year, when its researchers discovered logs of the attacks while reviewing the contents of a "command and control" server that they had discovered in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense companies.
It dubbed the attacks "Operation Shady RAT" and said the earliest breaches date back to mid-2006, though there might have been other intrusions. (RAT stands for "remote access tool," a type of software that hackers and security experts use to access computer networks from afar).
Some of the attacks lasted just a month, but the longest -- on the Olympic Committee of an unidentified Asian nation -- went on and off for 28 months, according to McAfee.
"Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to unscrupulous competitors," Alperovitch told Reuters.
"This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history," he said. "The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening."
CHINA CONNECTION?
Alperovitch said that McAfee had notified all 72 victims of the attacks, which are under investigation by law enforcement agencies around the world. He declined to give more details.
Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was very likely China was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would be of particular interest to Beijing.
The systems of the IOC and several national Olympic Committees were breached before the 2008 Beijing Games. And China views Taiwan as a renegade province, and political issues between them remain contentious even as economic ties have strengthened in recent years.
"Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia," Lewis said.
McAfee, acquired by Intel Corp this year, would not comment on whether China was responsible.
There was no comment from China on the report.
In Taiwan, an official of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, which has a cyber crime unit, said he had no knowledge of the McAfee report but added there had been no cases in recent years of hacking of government websites.
An official from the Japanese trade ministry's information security policy team said it was difficult to determine whether a specific government lay behind a cyber attack "although we see which countries the attacks originate from."
A team put together to investigate hacking was "finalizing some guidelines. We aim to raise the security level as a whole and build a partnership between private sector organizations where information can be shared to prevent such attacks."
STONE AGE
Vijay Mukhi, a cyber-expert based in India, says some South Asian governments were highly vulnerable to hacking from China.
"I'm not surprised because that's what China does, they are gradually dominating the cyberworld," he said. "I would call it child's play (for a hacker to get access to Indian government data) ... I would say we're in the stone age."
An Indian telecommunications ministry official declined to say whether he was aware of the hacking on the government.
The U.N. said it was aware of the report, and had started an investigation to ascertain if there was an intrusion.
McAfee released the report to coincide with the start of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, an annual meeting of security professionals who promote security and fight cyber crime.
(Additional reporting from Tom Miles in Geneva, Jack Kim in Seoul and James Pomfret in New Delhi, editing by Tiffany Wu, Martin Howell, Ron Popeski and Ed Lane)
http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-ever-series-cyber-attacks-uncovered-u-n-040749882.html
----------------------------------
The only question is what should we do about this?
(edit)
Pentagon Strategy Prepares For War In Cyberspace (http://www.npr.org/2011/07/15/137928048/u-s-military-unveils-cyberspace-strategy)
The U.S. military can fight on land, in the air, at sea and in space. Now it has a strategy for operations in a new domain: cyberspace.
Under a new plan unveiled Thursday, the Defense Department said it is preparing to treat cyberspace "as an operational domain," with forces specially organized, trained and equipped to deal with cyberthreats and opportunities.
The strategy presumes that "cyberattacks will be a significant component of any future conflict" and that the United States must be prepared to retaliate, possibly even with military force.
"The United States reserves the right, under the laws of armed conflict, to respond to serious cyberattacks with a proportional and justified military response at the time and place of its choosing," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said.
A cyberattack on the United States could prompt a military response under the Pentagon guidelines, however, only if it qualified as "an act of war," with effects comparable to those brought about under a traditional "kinetic" or physical attack, and it would be up to the president to make that judgment.
(edit) Update with a few important bits:
With a follow up Q & A
http://news.yahoo.com/q-massive-cyber-attack-dubbed-operation-shady-rat-041142146.html
Along with some information from an insider source:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/has-the-united-states-already-suffered-its-cyberwar-pearl-harbor/53901?tag=nl.e550
The white paper referenced makes for a very good read, and is fairly short:
http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/white-papers/wp-operation-shady-rat.pdf
If you aren't concerned about this, you should be.
There is a reason that part of our recent defense doctrine has directly equated cyberattacks to physical attacks, and allowed for the "full range" of military responses to such attacks. I will see if I can find that NPR story and link it in a later edit to this post.
----------------------------------------------------
BOSTON (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.
The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.
In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of its secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.
"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report released on Wednesday.
"What is happening to all this data ... 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."
McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this year, when its researchers discovered logs of the attacks while reviewing the contents of a "command and control" server that they had discovered in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense companies.
It dubbed the attacks "Operation Shady RAT" and said the earliest breaches date back to mid-2006, though there might have been other intrusions. (RAT stands for "remote access tool," a type of software that hackers and security experts use to access computer networks from afar).
Some of the attacks lasted just a month, but the longest -- on the Olympic Committee of an unidentified Asian nation -- went on and off for 28 months, according to McAfee.
"Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to unscrupulous competitors," Alperovitch told Reuters.
"This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history," he said. "The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening."
CHINA CONNECTION?
Alperovitch said that McAfee had notified all 72 victims of the attacks, which are under investigation by law enforcement agencies around the world. He declined to give more details.
Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was very likely China was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would be of particular interest to Beijing.
The systems of the IOC and several national Olympic Committees were breached before the 2008 Beijing Games. And China views Taiwan as a renegade province, and political issues between them remain contentious even as economic ties have strengthened in recent years.
"Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia," Lewis said.
McAfee, acquired by Intel Corp this year, would not comment on whether China was responsible.
There was no comment from China on the report.
In Taiwan, an official of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, which has a cyber crime unit, said he had no knowledge of the McAfee report but added there had been no cases in recent years of hacking of government websites.
An official from the Japanese trade ministry's information security policy team said it was difficult to determine whether a specific government lay behind a cyber attack "although we see which countries the attacks originate from."
A team put together to investigate hacking was "finalizing some guidelines. We aim to raise the security level as a whole and build a partnership between private sector organizations where information can be shared to prevent such attacks."
STONE AGE
Vijay Mukhi, a cyber-expert based in India, says some South Asian governments were highly vulnerable to hacking from China.
"I'm not surprised because that's what China does, they are gradually dominating the cyberworld," he said. "I would call it child's play (for a hacker to get access to Indian government data) ... I would say we're in the stone age."
An Indian telecommunications ministry official declined to say whether he was aware of the hacking on the government.
The U.N. said it was aware of the report, and had started an investigation to ascertain if there was an intrusion.
McAfee released the report to coincide with the start of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, an annual meeting of security professionals who promote security and fight cyber crime.
(Additional reporting from Tom Miles in Geneva, Jack Kim in Seoul and James Pomfret in New Delhi, editing by Tiffany Wu, Martin Howell, Ron Popeski and Ed Lane)
http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-ever-series-cyber-attacks-uncovered-u-n-040749882.html
----------------------------------
The only question is what should we do about this?
(edit)
Pentagon Strategy Prepares For War In Cyberspace (http://www.npr.org/2011/07/15/137928048/u-s-military-unveils-cyberspace-strategy)
The U.S. military can fight on land, in the air, at sea and in space. Now it has a strategy for operations in a new domain: cyberspace.
Under a new plan unveiled Thursday, the Defense Department said it is preparing to treat cyberspace "as an operational domain," with forces specially organized, trained and equipped to deal with cyberthreats and opportunities.
The strategy presumes that "cyberattacks will be a significant component of any future conflict" and that the United States must be prepared to retaliate, possibly even with military force.
"The United States reserves the right, under the laws of armed conflict, to respond to serious cyberattacks with a proportional and justified military response at the time and place of its choosing," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said.
A cyberattack on the United States could prompt a military response under the Pentagon guidelines, however, only if it qualified as "an act of war," with effects comparable to those brought about under a traditional "kinetic" or physical attack, and it would be up to the president to make that judgment.
(edit) Update with a few important bits:
With a follow up Q & A
http://news.yahoo.com/q-massive-cyber-attack-dubbed-operation-shady-rat-041142146.html
Along with some information from an insider source:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/has-the-united-states-already-suffered-its-cyberwar-pearl-harbor/53901?tag=nl.e550
The white paper referenced makes for a very good read, and is fairly short:
http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/white-papers/wp-operation-shady-rat.pdf