Chinese whispers as government implicated in UK hack attacks
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, Security, Internet on
It’s all very hush hush, of course, but reports are circulating that the Director General of MI5 has within the last few days sent a ‘confidential’ letter to as many as 300 bank CEOs and security execs, accountants and legal firms across the UK. The letter apparently warns them that they are ‘under attack’ from Chinese state organisations. As a direct result of this leaked missive, security experts Finjan have taken the unusual step of making the interim results of a study public despite only being half way through the actual thing.
Although the full details of the study are to be revealed later in the month, Finjan researchers have been mapping how PCs are being infected by Trojans distributed from China. The payload being theft of data from organisations of course. Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) have detected malicious activity by groups that distribute their content using obfuscated code and a network of websites to bypass traditional information security technology.
Some of the attacks were of the sophisticated zero-day variety, so there was no patch to protect the victims, and I am led to believe that a number of new hacking techniques have been identified.
I am also informed that Finjan discovered a centralized group of such hacking activity based out of China, with one of the websites concerned belonging to a Chinese governmental office no less.
“This development is disturbing for governments, enterprises and individuals alike.” Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak says “signature-based technologies like Anti-virus and URL Filtering are limited, against this type of attack, the number of vectors and sophisticated structure of the network of websites has been designed to by-pass traditional information security technology based on signatures and URL filtering. To defend against this type of attack security solutions need to employ real-time content inspection technology that analyzes each and every piece of web content in real-time, regardless of its original source or domain name.”
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Loading ...Comment by paper machines - June 30, 2008 on 11:32 am
I’ve seen really funny translations in Yunnan, China as well. One that was funny “pasta with meat sauce” was translated into something along the lines of “meat face tomato paste.” The reason is “pasta” is pronounced “mien” in Chinese, but “mien” is also the word for “face.” I think there are a lot of mistranslations like these.
I got to give them credit for trying though! I wonder the Chinese would have a good laugh at English menus if they tried translating them to Chinese!!!
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