McAfee Disclaims Claims of Chinese Involvement in 'Shady RAT'
hackingbear writes "In an interview with Chinese official Xinhua news agency, McAfee said no direct evidence suggests a particular nation such as China is behind Operation Shady RAT, a five-year cyber campaign discovered by McAfee. Alperovitch told Xinhua that they 'don't have direct evidence that conclusively points to a particular nation state' behind the scheme. So the same online security industry that has propagated Chinese cyber threats in front of Western media denies they made such suggestion of China, another of their major markets." Also on the Shady RAT front, reader kermidge writes with a post from Hon Lau at Symantec containing details lacking in McAfee's Wednesday report; included are examples of the vectors and commands used, along with cogent commentary.
"don't have direct evidence that conclusively points to a particular nation state" behind the scheme
If all IP's point back to one country that country either is the victim of being a patsy "They must have routed all their traffic trough our unsuspecting country. We were set up! Those bastards!!" or they they did it. Do we think any country is going to admit it even if they are caught red handed? Of course not.
Once again confirming our suspicions about why there hasn't been an uproar from companies that matches the scale of the attack.
Reading the details I really wonder why this is supposed to be a government-backed up attack. Neither the trojan nor the attack vector described by the guy from Symantec look very sophisticated to me. From a government-sponsored attack I'd at least expect some previously unknown exploits, rootkit, traffic tunneling, anti-virus product circumvention and generally more efforts to hide that there is a trojan or an outgoing connection.
There must be something missing. So, what's so special about this particular persistent attack?
The Chinese must have gotten to McAfee as well.
Not having read the original report nor the full interview transcript (neither of which seem like reliable sources), I don't see anything contradictory. Combine the quotes and it's still perfectly reasonable:
You should never get your security analyses from the same people who sell security products.
It's like asking a car dealer how expensive a car you need.
It's one of the basic problems with these attacks. There's always plausible deniability.
If they can be effective using mundane attacks and get away with it why shouldn't they? Not all attacks need to be Stuxnet-level sophisticated.
Since it's the "Chinese official Xinhua news agency", the readers will understand that whatever they read, the truth is actually the opposite.
Buy your copy of McAfee, certified by the venerable government of China, now!
Am I Under a Shady RAT attack? http://www.shadyratchecker.com/
the global realm of capitalism, sticking your dick in the eye of the second largest
economy in the world is still considered poor enough form. Besides, one would conject
the source of an attack is not Mcaffee's priority, rather its vector, mitigation, methods and
ostensibly its impact.
nations, now they do a bang-up job of figuring out what enemy-du-jour of the state has perpetrated
the heinous act of knowing more about computers than they do.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. or that other word.
Anyone know what this is purported to be about?
(05:13:21 PM) bradass87: oh, btw... china has a massive botnet .mil info... as well as penetrate google (like what became public earlier this year) .gov and .mil
(05:13:31 PM) bradass87: 45+ million, grows 100,000 every two weeks
(05:14:44 PM) bradass87: it pings eucom and pacom servers every two weeks at the same time... spread out slightly to prevent the bandwidth from being detected (it was identified at 20 million in late 2008)
(05:15:53 PM) bradass87: 45+ million ip addresses... i figure they must have a pre-installed system on consumer electronics
(05:20:00 PM) bradass87: are you familiar with the Byzantine problem sets?
(05:22:15 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: nope
(05:23:10 PM) bradass87: Byzantine is the code word for all the chinese infiltration problem sets... the ones that get
(05:23:16 PM) bradass87: yahoo, etc
(05:23:23 PM) bradass87: mostly
(05:23:46 PM) bradass87: there are several sub-problem sets...
(05:24:15 PM) bradass87: Byzantine Candor, for instance
(05:24:51 PM) bradass87: its what 95% of information warfare people work on in DoD
(05:25:15 PM) bradass87: china can knock out any network in the world with a DDos
(05:36:07 PM) bradass87: their gateways throughout the world are clearly identified, and are being tracked carefully
same industry that allowed the SONY rootkit to go undetected even though they knew of it and the only av to catch it ...well he sold out now too.
OH NO your at there mercy now..../me runs around screaming in circles "the worlds at an end ahhhhhhh"....
There was no direct evidence that Google was functioning as a pawn in US foreign policy regarding China, but that didn't stop Xinhua from alluding to the allegations (that came from their political superiors).
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-01/24/c_13148771.htm
Maybe Xinhua isn't the best source for a neutral perspective.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
So, what the article is really saying is that McAfee in an interview with Xinhua (a subsidiary of State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council "SASAC") denied that they thought the "Gubm't did it". Awesome.
No news here.
Big Business continues to kiss the Chinese Governments butt out of fear of loosing there cheep sweatshop labor. Nothing to see here wake me up when McAfee makes a Free Tibet version of there product. or GM Signs the Dali lama as a spokes person.
I'm beginning to smell a big fat commie rat!
Wow, i am sure the share holders are happy to hear that McAfee's credibility went out the window when they contradicted themselves from a previous report. Now, I can never fully trust what they say, as I see, they are either wrong...and dont know what they are doing, or are quick to contradict themselves, when the payday is big enough.