LONDON: China-based hackers had made an unsuccessful attack on British parliament during the Christmas holidays, exploiting an unplugged flaw in the Microsoft Windows Meta File, according to newspaper reports.
Fortunately, the attack was detected and foiled by the parliament's internet security system. The hackers could not access any important data, the reports said. The Commons' IT security staff alerted the National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC), and security experts were deployed to monitor the attacks, and the exercise indicated the origin of the attacks to be Chinese and the hackers to be well resourced.
The cyber attacks constituted emails sent to secretaries, researchers, parliamentary staff and some of the MPs, each email specifically designed for the person receiving it. Once opened, these emails would download sophisticated spyware that will search for information on the recipient's system and the network, which would be routed to the hackers without the user's knowledge.
The NISCC said the hackers were highly sophisticated and clever programmers.
A spokesperson for the home officer declined to comment on the reports.
British and U.S. security experts have since analysed the incident and they are of the opinion that the hackers could be based in the Guangdong province in southern China. They also suspect that the hackers were working with the tacit approval or support of authorities.
Experts said the attack would have occurred on the morning of 2 January before Microsoft's official patch for the software flaw was available.
According to the security experts, the infected messages were sent to around 70 people in parliament and also elsewhere, trying to lure the recipients to open an infected attachment containing what is described as WMF Setabortproc Trojan. However, the emails were blocked by security firm MessageLabs' email filtering system.
Posted
on : Wed, 25 Jan 2006 14:00 GMT | General News
By : Anne Philips
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