China Thought To Be Behind Global Cyber-Espionage Campaign That Hit UN, Olympic Committee
A senior researcher at McAfee has gone public with evidence of one of the largest cyber espionage campaigns in recent history, but while he has refused to speculate on who may be responsible for the theft of government secrets and corporate documents, other than to say it was “state sponsored,” fingers are pointing squarely at China.
The research, first reported by Vanity Fair, shows that perpetrators spent at least five years stealing documents and other intellectual property from 72 government and private organisations in 14 countries. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee is credited with discovering the the campaign, called Operation Shady RAT, or “remote access tool.”
Why China? The targets included the computer networks of the International Olympic Committee in the run up to the Beijing Olympic games in 2008, and Asian governments such as Taiwan and Hong Kong–not China itself. Forty-nine targets, the vast majority, were American companies, government agencies and nonprofit organisations, particularly defence contractors, Vanity Fair reports.
Alperovitch started investigating the campaign in 2009 when an American defence contractor found suspicious programs running on its network. McAfee says evidence of the breaches go back to mid-2006, possibly earlier. Much of the campaign involved sending spear-phishing emails, where an unsuspecting target would click on a link, activating a program that would then runs quietly in the background of their computer network.
McAfee’s Alperovitch would only publicly named four victims in his investigation: The International Olympic Committee, The World Anti-doping Agency, The United Nations and ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Cyber security expert James Lewis of the Technology and Public Police Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies was quoted by Vanity Fair as saying that “all signs point to China… Who else spies on Taiwan?”
“This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history,” Alperovitch was quoted as saying. “The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening.”