Over the last five years, the IT security firm, McAfee has been working on an investigation that examined information form different organisations that they thought have been hit by cyber attacks.
The investigation, named ‘Operation Shady RAT’, started in 2006 where they looked into the traffic going in and out of numerous organisations, and Mr Samani, McAfee’s Chief Technology Officer in Europe, claims that “From the logs we were able to see where the traffic flow was coming from,”.
The total list of organisations that were under investigation is 72 and includes the International Olympic Committee, the UN and various security firms. Some organisations permitted them to “delve a bit deeper and see what, if anything, had been taken, and in many cases we (McAfee) found evidence that intellectual property had been stolen.”, said Mr Samani.
He also added that “The United Nations, the Indian government, the International Olympic Committee, the steel industry, defence firms, even computer security companies were hit,”
McAfee isn’t in a rush to say who they think is behind the attacks or if it is even a single group, but there is speculation about China being responsible for the attacks with Beijing always denying any involvement in cyber-attacks or the sort, claiming the accusations to be “groundless”.
The stolen data’s whereabouts and use us unknown but the type of data can easily be sold on to competing firms to improve their own products and eventually allow them to take over the market, grasping a firm foothold in their sector and monopolising it, causing a major economic threat.
Mr Samani explains the process of the attacks and how they developed to cause this attack.
"This was what we call a spear-phish attack, as opposed to a trawl, where they were targeting specific individuals within an organisation," said Mr Samani.
"An email would be sent to an individual with the right level of access within the system; attached to the message was a piece of malware which would then execute and open a channel to a remote website giving them access.
"Once they had access to an organisation, they either did what we would call a ‘smash-and-grab’ operation, where they would try and grab as much information before they got caught, or they sometimes embedded themselves in the network and [tried to] spread across different systems within an organisation."
Mr Cluley, a computer-security expert with Sophos, said firms were often distracted by the very public actions of LulzSec and Anonymous, groups of online activists who have hacked a number of high-profile websites in recent months.
"Sometimes it’s not about stealing your money or publicly leaking your data. It’s about quietly stealing your information, which can have a very high political, military or financial value.
"In short, don’t let your defences down," he added.
