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Trojan Built for Industrial Espionage
xPertCodert writes "Some of the largest Israeli companies are involved in the major industral espionage case, in which private investigators implanted specially crafted Trojan horses on the computers at unsuspecting companies in a bid to obtain priviledged financial and technical data. Given the current state of Windows security and advances in spyware, probably any company has become a very easy target for such spy attack from competitors"
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/ Security-Enhanced Linux!
I'm sure glad I don't rely on closed source products for my security needs. :)
If the entire scandal was percipitated by Bezek (the reigning ILEC/MaBell of Israel). Bezek was complacent about the coming of the cell phone in the early '90s and was so late to the game that it's practically a non-player.
To the contrary, Pele-Phone trademark name actually became Israeli "xerox" - every cell phone is called a "pelephone" in the vernacular. So if Bezek wanted to hurt the ungrateful competitors' market share, the trojan scandal would do nicely.
Any fool can criticize... And many do.
exactly. For the love of god. you know that anything attached to the internet is not ever going to be "completely" (heck most things will never even be marginaly) secured so if you want to keep the data safe no matter what kind of data that is. the only way is to keep the damn machines of the net.
I belive some interesting research could be done into the six degrees of separation theory and large networks using gateways and subnets
just how "off the net" is that deep rooted bank system running the ATMs when theres sysadmins that have access directly to it... and probably have access to the company net for conveneince... and that has a gateway... etc...
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Whats with the To confirm your not a script. Its wasting my precious seconds
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XML - A clever joke would be here if
In Israel, workstations in all large corporate networks are very well protected.
;-)
It's much cheaper to find a dirty sysadmin that will push a small MSI to all AD clients then actually writing a full blown Trojan that should first of all plant itself on the target computer, taking the risk of being discovered by some techy user.
So keep MS bashing for another article
Did it involve an exploit?
Yep, although not a buffer overflow it is an exploit on the system design that allows executing and installation of programs without the users specific consent. Not much unlike the days when you could email an Active-X control to people and it would automatically execute just by viewing the message.
Users are led to believe these files are safe to open. When in fact they should be viewed as are they safe to execute.
So the bad guys exploited the misperception that (Microsoft) document files are data files safe to "open".
But you should read the article in full. It presents the reader with a good deal of information about how business and ecomonics is taught, and how this affects corporate behavior and governance. This is an academic article and the writing style is typical of most academic writing, dry and constantly interrupted with references and citations. A more condensed version, edited for the for the lay person, would be most welcome. The fundamental ideas expressed within this article deserves a far greater audience.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
oh please, why is it always a conspiracy theory just because you don't know about it personally? I'll even give you some Newsmax sources,
"The Chinese air force is equipped with the Harpy medium-range anti-radar missile acquired from Israel, and its new Chengdu J-10 strike fighter uses technology obtained from the canceled Israeli Lavi program. link
Here we go from the Asian Times, " Israel has also been a long-standing supplier of advanced military technologies to China. According to the findings of a past US congressional committee chaired by Representative Christopher Cox (Republican-California), Israel has "offered significant technology cooperation to the People's Republic of China, especially in aircraft and missile development", including helping China build its current F-10 fighter jet." LINK
Here's a nice article from the Jerusalem Post about the u.s. suspending cooperative development on the arrow-2 missile defence system with Israel. quote, "A source quoted by MENL explained the rationale for the encroaching US boycott: "It's all about China." As the report explained, "The Pentagon, with full support of the administration, does not want to deal with Israeli products or technology that could be sent to China."
There's plenty more information available from all your favourite right-wing sources about the chinese-israeli love affair that's been going on for 20 years. You just have to look because FoxNews & CNN are not interested in telling you about it.
I live in Israel, and this topic was just on the evening news. They interviewed a secretary in one of the corporations whose computer was compromised and confidential documents were stolen from it. It was a Windows machine.
But that doesn't mean all of the infected computers had Microsoft products on them.
The media coverage is pretty thin on technical details, but it is known (and I believe is stated in TFA) that the trojan was written specifically for each corporation, by order of the competing company at a cost of about 2000 GBP. So it is possible that some trojans were written for OS systems.
Israeli law has very clear (though recent) laws about computer related crimes. It is almost certain that the PI's will do time for this. One reason for this is that they also hacked into the police computers to get info on the investigation. Big mistake...