UK Critical Structures Targeted by Trojan Attacks

ElGanzoLoco writes "The UK's National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre is reporting that key british infrastructures (government, telecom, transports, banks among others) are under attack by specific, targeted e-mail trojans. According to their report (PDF), 'the emails use social engineering to appear credible, with subject lines often referring to news articles that would be of interest to the recipient. In fact they are "spoofed", making them appear to originate from trusted contacts, news agencies or Government departments.'. The attackers are apparently trying to gather sensitive or secret data. While the NISCC has not been able to precisely trace the attacks' origins, most IPs seem to trace back to Far-East Asia."

Comments

lol?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is a sustained attack:
1) block these emails
2) educate staff to be aware of this atleast in the short-term
3) hold educated staff atleast partly responsible for any infections that result from this attack
4) we need to vote in a government that actually knows how to use a computer

Re:lol?

[BiggyP]

It could be that a lot of these links, the ones that appear dead, do so only because the spoofing vulnerability in use doesn't work in the browser you're using.

Imagine if the UK government stopped wasting vast amounts of money licensing windows for their end users and switched to something a little less bug ridden.

Far East Asia?

[EQ]

Perhaps the fabled North Korean Super Hackers at work?

Although why woudl they want anything to do with the UK? Isnt it the USA thats their bete noir?

China and Russia according to Radio 4

[lxdbxr]

On the Radio 4 "Today" program this morning they covered this story, the correspondent basically said that NISCC knows where the attacks are coming from (& I would be surprised if they didn't, NISCC are pretty competent people), but did not spell it out in the report to avoid diplomatic complications. The Radio 4 guy reckoned that these specific, targeted attacks (mostly against gov.uk) were coming from China and Russia, though whether private or state actors he didn't say.

No mention of North Korean superhackers, I was a little disappointed :-)