Cyber espionage on huge scale revealed by McAfee

A cyber crime gang hacked into the computers of dozens of companies and organisations across the world over the course of five years, stealing trade secrets, industrial designs and other sensitive information, according to the online security company.

The Olympic Committee, the UN, a British defence contractor and a German accounting firm were only four of the victims of a prolonged cyber espionage operation, McAfee said in a report that was released yesterday. Neither the individual targets nor the suspected force behind the attacks were named by the firm, whose vice-president, Dmitri Alperovich, said they were “surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organisations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators.”

The attacks, which in some cases lasted two years, were carried out by targeted emails to individuals at the different organizations that contained an attachment which, if opened, released malicious software that gave the attackers remote access to the infected computers. Through these computers, the hackers then accessed whole networks.

McAfee learned of these attacks by coming across a “command and control” server that was used to manage the hacking campaign and contained logs revealing details of the attacks.

Although no suspects were explicitly named, there is widespread belief that an Asian government, most likely China, has had something to do with the attacks. This theory is given weight by the idea that the attacks would have delivered no financial gain to any criminal group, and the sheer range of different targets (construction companies, US news organisations, the World Anti-Doping Agency, etc.). China has dismissed all allegations.

The campaign has been named Operation Shady RAT (where RAT stands for “remote access tool”) and is a revelation likely to spread fear across companies and organisations all across the world.

“This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history,” Alperovitch said. “The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening.”

Image credit: Marcie Casas