The evolution of Shady rat’s activity provides more circumstantial evidence of Chinese involvement in the hacks. The operation targeted a broad range of public- and private-sector organizations in almost every country in Southeast Asia—but none in China. And most of Shady rat’s targets are known to be of interest to the People’s Republic. In 2006, or perhaps earlier, the intrusions began by targeting eight organizations, including South Korean steel and construction companies, a South Korean government agency, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, a U.S. real-estate company, international-trade organizations of Western and Asian nations, and the ASEAN Secretariat. (According to McAfee’s Operation Shady rat white paper, [t]hat last intrusion began in October [2006], a month prior to the organization’s annual summit in Singapore, and continued for another 10 months.) In 2007, the activity ramped up to hit 29 organizations. In addition to those previously targeted, new victims included a technology company owned by the Vietnamese government, four U.S. defense contractors, a U.S. federal-government agency, U.S. state and county government organizations, a computer-network-security company—and the national Olympic committees of two countries in Asia and one in the West, as well as the I.O.C. The Olympic organizations, strikingly, were targeted in the months leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Shady rat’s activity continued to build in 2008, when it infiltrated the networks of 36 organizations, including the United Nations—and reached a crest of 38 organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, in 2009. Since then, the victim numbers have been dropping, but the activity continues. Shady rat’s command-and-control server is still operating, and some organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, were still under attack as of last month. (As of Tuesday, according to a WADA spokesman, the group was unaware of any breach, but WADA is investigating McAfee’s discovery.) The longest compromise duration—on and off for 28 months, according to McAfee’s report—was one Asian country’s Olympic committee. Many others were compromised for two full years. Nine organizations were compromised for one month or less. All others were compromised for a minimum of one month, potentially allowing for complete access to all data on their servers. Michael Joseph Gross
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 01:00:00 +0000
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