Posted on Pakalert on August 8, 2011
Security experts have uncovered a five-year-long hacking scheme, believed to be from China, which targeted U.S. government and U.N. computers.
The country is accused of systematically launching huge cyber attacks on computers and trawling for precious data, before stealing it.
The cyber-espionage dubbed ‘Operation Shady RAT’ also hacked into defence firms and private industries, security firm McAfee, discovered.
It led to a massive loss of information that poses a huge economic threat, security experts say.
Hacked: China is accused of breaching the Pentagon’s computer network and stealing highly sensitive files
But even more surprising, U.S. cyber police appear to have failed to uncover it.
McAfee’s vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch said the company had been startled at the sheer scale of the hacking.
‘Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,’ he said.
His report claimed the spying came from a single, unnamed source widely believed to be China, but offered few details for others to verify and did not identify most of the 72 victims, 49 of which were American.
The security firm could only hazard a guess at exactly what data was stolen.
If accurate, the government appears to have learned of the systematic, ongoing cyberspying not from its own cyber-police but from the McAfee report, representatives from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, U. S. Cyber Command and others told FoxNews.com
Breach: U.S. cyberpolice were told even the United Nations, had been hacked
Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said they would investigate the report’s findings.
‘We became aware of the McAfee report I think today, which is when it was released to the press as well.
‘We obviously will evaluate it and look at it and pursue what needs to be pursued.’
The White House was briefed on the report by Mr Alperovitch about two weeks ago.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said: ‘We’re aware of the report.
‘Detecting and blocking cyberintrusion is a key cybersecurity goal for this administration.’
Col. Rivers Johnson, the spokesman for U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, said the agency was doing it all it can to protect the country from cyberattacks.
Cybersecurity in U.S. leadership has seen a dramatic turnover in leadership in the last few years.
Chief cybercop Randy Vickers director of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT resigned on July 22.
Phil Retinger, the Department of Homeland Security’s head of computer crimes, quit in May of this year.
In August of 2009, Melissa Hathaway, the interim White House cybersecurity czar, resigned for personal reasons.
And Rod Beckstrom, the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber-security chief, resigned in March of 2009.
Te Pentagon has been victim to a wave of cyberattacks in recent months.
Secretary of Defense Bill Lynn revealed in March that the Pentagon had recently suffered its largest ever cyberbreach – with 24,000 data files stolen from the network.
Director of the National Security Agency Gen Keith Alexander, who also serves as the head of the Pentagon’s new Cyber Command, estimated IN March that each year more than 300 million dollars of intellectual property is stolen through cyberattack.
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1 comments:
I wonder if they have considered the possibility that Israel is behind it?
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