| Govt agencies and businesses under Trojan attack |
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A group of hackers, believed to be from the Far East, is and has been targeting UK governmant agencies and companies by attacking their systems to acquire secrets and vital information for some considerable time.
The group has been responsible for over a thousand break-in attempts in the past over a year. Their modus operandi is highly sophisticated and high-tech. as per Dr Andrew Blyth, head of Glamorgan University's Computer Forensics Department, “To have achieved what this gang are doing, then it either has to be state-sponsored or the highest level or organised crime.”
As per security and intelligence experts, the behavior of the hackers is much different from what it has been in the past and also seems to lack the motive of fast financial gains.
The number of attacks has significantly increased, with there being three attacks a day in the past week. There are, however, quite a few other organized hacking groups around the world too that are fast becoming part of the growing high-tech crime wave.
According to experts, the group is targeting companies and agencies that they have already targeted once. This means that they first send innocuous looking mails to individuals after identifying the targets and their interests. These mails are laden with Trojans that get installed on the computer when the mail is opened, allowing the gang access to the information on the system.
The gang, supposed to comprise of 12 members, then might be using the information to blackmail the company or in individual.
Paul Woods, a computer security expert with MessageLabs said, “They change the program for every message so that it is not picked up by the anti-virus and spyware filters. They also change them so that they can suck information from particular programs that are used in a specific industry.” This makes the viruses highly undetectable and hard to arrest.
Sources from the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre have confirmed that the attacks have been going on for many months now, with the gang returning to attack the same company but using a different email address everytime. The sectors attacked till now include aerospace, pharmaceuticals and human rights organizations.
The NISCC is working with agencies in the Far East to turn off the computers suspected of sending the mails. The warning, NISCC officials said, was issued to find out the exact scale of the attacks or does it cover only companies and government departments in the areas of communication, energy, finance, health and transport.
“We have never seen anything like this in terms of the industrial scale of this series of attacks. This is not a few hackers sitting in their bedroom trying to steal bank account details from individuals," NISCC Director Roger Cumming told the Associated Press.
Posted
on : Sat, 18 Jun 2005 20:45 GMT | General News
By : Anne Philips
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