(Image source: Silicon Republic)
BY JIM FLINK
ANCHOR BLAKE HANSON
You're watching multisource tech news analysis from Newsy
Smell a rat?
Cyber firm -- McAfee -- does.
And that rat -- has reportedly been rooting around more than 70 governments, corporations and non-profits -- stealing secrets.
Vanity Fair has the exclusive.
“McAfee says ... victims include government agencies in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Canada... the International Olympic Committee ... Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, and India... The category most heavily targeted was defense contractors—13 in all.”
The New York Times notes, this has been going on a while.
“The earliest breaches dated from mid-2006, though McAfee said there might have been other intrusions still undetected. The duration of the attacks ranged from a month to what McAfee said was a sustained 28-month attack against an Olympic committee of an unidentified Asian nation.”
So who’s responsible?
McAfee won’t say.
But TechEye is reading the tea leaves, and thinks it knows.
“McAfee believes that there was one ‘state actor’ behind the attacks. It ... appears to be talking about China. ... Hackers broke into the computer system of the UN Secretariat ... and hid there unnoticed for nearly two years. Shedloads of secret data were sent to China before the attack was noticed.”
Now -- to the code name.
RAT stands for -- remote access tool -- the kind the hackers used to get inside.
McAfee’s Threat Research VP says -- this isn’t just any old hack -- it’s much, much bigger.
“What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets, source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, design schematics and much more has ‘fallen off the truck’ of numerous, mostly Western companies....”
In that same post, McAfee has given many more details on Operation Shady RAT too numerous to mention here. Wanna link? Find it -- in our transcript section.
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