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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.
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?
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.
The problem with your theory is this: You don't blame the US government when old Spam King pounds the living shit out of FB do you? The USA is #1 in spamming last I checked (Amazing, we're #1 at something? why hasn't this been outsourced already?) but I doubt seriously Obama is sitting in the White House going "Hey, ya know what? Why isn't their more herbal viagra ads and cheap webcam whores in my inbox. That just ain't right. tell the guys at the Pentagon to get on that shit."
While I wouldn't be surprised if SOME of it is the Chinese government because to quote a line from one of my favorite movies :"You know how they do this? Its because they fucking steal, they steal every idea that ain't nailed down" and this is SOP among governments. We used to pay a bounty for any pilot that would bring us the latest Soviet fighters, Israel stole the Mirage V to make Nesher after they were embargoed, and the Chinese paid dirt farmers to dig up the F117 that crashed in Kosovo so they could snatch stealth tech.
But to say it is the government doing something you need more than an IP address coming from that country, hell you need more than an IP address coming from a governmental IP block. Or did everyone forget when the plans for Marine One and several other top secret highly classified docs ended up on Kazaa because some brain trust working in Washington decided to install P2P and share the whole drive? I kinda doubt that was SOP at the Pentagon even though it would have shown up as a government IP address. I can just imagine the doc written to support P2P in the government: "If the unit lacks sufficient adult entertainment or popular entertainment (as defined by 154c-current billboard (tm) top 100) then after getting approval from an immediate superior one may install ONE and ONLY one approved P2P from the approved list after watching training film 475f-How to get teh titties and tunez, P2P and you."
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.