'Chinese cyberspies' target energy giants
Night Dragon, cyber tiger
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Five global energy and oil firms have been the target of "coordinated covert and targeted cyberattacks" by hackers based in China, according to net security firm McAfee.
The five unnamed petrochemical giants are confirmed victims of the so-called Night Dragon attacks, which began before November 2009 and remain ongoing.
Evidence suggests a further seven firms were hit by a series of attacks that used a combination of social engineering, spear-phishing, Windows exploits, Active Directory compromises and the use of Trojans.
Hackers used a combination of these attacks to target sensitive data including "proprietary operations and project-financing information on oil and gas field bids and operations".
The attacks, confirmed as ongoing for at least two years and possibly dating from at least four years ago, probably originated from China, according to various strands of circumstantial evidence.
"The tools, techniques, and network activities used in these attacks originate primarily in China," explained McAfee CTO George Kurtz, in a blog post.
"These tools are widely available on the Chinese Web forums and tend to be used extensively by Chinese hacker groups. McAfee has determined identifying features to assist companies with detection and investigation."
McAfee has published a white paper on the attacks, which provides more information on attack mitigation and further background on the alleged assault.
The latest attacks follow the same pattern, and use broadly the same malware along with social engineering trickery, as the Operation Aurora attacks against Google and other hi-tech firms last year. McAfee said that the two operations used different attack profiles and malicious tools.
It's possible that the real perpetrators of the attack are using Chinese tools and compromised Chinese PCs to launch the latest assault, so as to point the finger of blame towards China. But as things stand the Chinese state (which has extensive cyberespionage capabilities) remains the prime suspect.
Last year the Christian Science Monitor reported on Aurora-style targeted attacks against Marathon Oil, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil dating. Data harvested via the attacks included information on new energy discoveries, just like the sort of data targeted by Night Dragon. Each of the targeted firms only become aware of the assault following notification by the FBI. ®
COMMENTS
Great firewall
Maybe the rest of the world should erect its own "great firewall" and cut China off from the worldwide internet. While we're at it, cut off N. Korea too (loads of crap comes from there too).
I have blocked ALL traffic from China for years now. If you MUST let them have access then set up a seperate, minimalist system that they can spam/hack that won't matter so much.
Judging From My Experience With Corporate Germany
...this report could be fully true, except for the "McAfee solutions for the problem" part.
Instead of having a proper (ie speedy, pervasive) patch policy in place, the corpos have two-factor-authentication, x-ray machines to check the bag you bring in and restrictive physical access policies.
Worker's PCs have age-old firefoxes, age-old Flash and age-old JavaWebstart versions installed. Exfiltration by Google Mail's SSL is certainly possible. Spearphishing would be the easiest thing one can imagine.
One example:
http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/2008/0816_spearphishing.pdf
The management people don't want to be bothered with the problem, they do not want to develop social and technological solutions which would reconcile security with business efficiency. All they are willing to do is to shell out money for some Magical Device, which would fend off the threat at the firewall. Because this does not require interacting with these smelly unshaved computer folks.
I know that there exist sophisticated firewall-level detection technologies, but they do not block an attacker who is aware of them. For example, a Firefox-based malware could first use an exploit in the Javascript engine to start itself and then use another exploit to persist itself into the cache of Firefox. Only after running for a long time (hours, days) the exploit would do its malicious work. How is a firewall-based "Firefox Simulation Sandbox" supposed to detect that ?
A sophisticated AppArmor- or Sandboxie-based solution could thwart this attack. But that would require more than writing a cheque. It would require these "skilled executives" to use their brain cells. Horrible !
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