McAfee: hacking has produced an "historically unprecedented transfer of wealth"

[Andre Kesteloot]

IDG News Service - Security vendor McAfee published a detailed report on 
Tuesday about a hacking group that penetrated 72 companies and 
organizations in 14 countries since 2006 in a massive operation that 
stole national secrets, business plans and other sensitive information.

McAfee said the attackers are likely a single group acting on behalf of 
a government, differing from the recent wave of less sophisticated 
attacks from cyber activist groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, 
according to the report 
<http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/white-papers/wp-operation-shady-rat.pdf>.

McAfee did not say what country might have been working with the 
hackers, in contrast to companies such as Google 
<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136345/Google_Update>, which as 
recently as last month blamed China for hacking into the Gmail accounts 
of several high-profile U.S. officials.

The intrusions, which McAfee called Operation Shady RAT, was discovered 
after the security <http://www.computerworld.com/s/topic/17/Security> 
vendor gained access to a command-and-control server that collected data 
from the hacked computers and logged the intrusions.

"After painstaking analysis of the logs, even we were surprised by the 
enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by 
the audacity of the perpetrators," wrote Dmitri Alperovitch, vice 
president of threat research at McAfee, and author of the report.

Alperovitch wrote that over the past five to six years there has been 
nothing short of a *"historically unprecedented transfer of wealth"* due 
to the hacking operation.

The data stolen consists of everything from classified information on 
government networks, source code, e-mail archives, exploration details 
for new oil and gas field auctions, legal contracts, SCADA (supervisory 
control and data acquisition) configurations, design schematics and 
more, Alperovitch said.

McAfee declined to name most of the organizations attacked, referring to 
businesses such as "South Korean Steel Company," "U.S. Defense 
Contractor #1" and "Taiwanese Electronics Company," among others.

Those that were named include the International Olympic Committee (IOC), 
the World Anti-Doping Agency, the United Nations and the ASEAN 
(Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretariat. Those 
organizations, however, were not of economic interest to hackers, and 
"potentially pointed a finger at a state actor behind the intrusions," 
Alperovitch wrote.

The hacking group gained access to computers by first sending targeted 
e-mails to individuals within the companies or organizations. The 
e-mails contained an exploit that, if executed, would cause the download 
of a piece of malicious software that communicates with the 
command-and-control server.

In 2006, eight organizations were attacked, but by 2007 the number 
jumped to 29 organizations, according to the report. The number of 
victimized organizations increased to 36 in 2008 and peaked at 38 in 
2009 before starting to fall, "likely due to the widespread availability 
of the countermeasures for the specific intrusion indicators used by 
this specific actor," Alperovitch wrote.

The duration of the compromises ranged from less than a month to up to 
more than two years in the case of an attack on the Olympic committee of 
a unnamed nation in Asia.

/John Ribeiro covers outsourcing 
<http://www.computerworld.com/s/topic/60/Outsourcing> and general 
technology breaking news from India for /The IDG News Service/. Follow 
John on Twitter 
<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9157658/Twitter_update_News_blogs_opinions_and_more_about_the_microblogging_service> 
at @Johnribeiro <http://twitter.com/Johnribeiro>. John's e-mail address 
is john_ribeiro at idg.com <mailto:john_ribeiro at idg.com>/

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