Chinese Cyber Espionage
Techtree News Staff, Apr 11, 2008 1603 hrs IST
Reports suggest that the recent increase in cyber attacks are the result of the sudden patches issued by Microsoft in 2006 and 2007.
Hack-attacks have been occurring since a long time. However, it has been recently noted that there has been a rise in Cyber attacks originating from China on the US Government, Defence, and pro-Tibet organizations. Latest reports suggest that the sudden patches issued by Microsoft in 2006 and 2007 were a result of such hack-attacks exposing several loopholes in the Office Suite.
In the past, hackers were motivated to steal insider trading information, trade secrets, or unreleased movies for piracy; but now these attacks are getting increasingly political, which has resulted in them being widely reported and thoroughly investigated.
These attacks began in 2006, when hackers sent malicious Word and Excel files to would-be victims. F-Secure, an online security provider, has observed the escalation in spying done with Trojans, a shift that has happened in the last two years. Microsoft had been issuing patches in 2005 and 2006, but in October 2006 a record 26 patches were issued by Microsoft fixing 4 critical bugs. F-secure officials say that those fixes were a result of the rise in Chinese attacks.
Attackers sent emails containing malicious attachments, which if opened would crash the application and install keyloggers and other data-stealing software. The data was then forwarded to the hackers through anonymous servers like 8800.org which hid their footprints. Later, the document would open as normal, thus letting the hacked user not even be aware that something wrong had happened, let alone suspect that their personal data has been copied.
Miko H. Hypponen, chief research officer at F-secure says that a particular defense contractor who sought F-Secure's help found that a single compromised Windows box had been secretly siphoning information to a server in mainland China for 18 months. These attacks have been speculated to be sponsored by the Chinese Government, but there are no facts to prove it.
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