Ongoing Attacks Target Defense, Aerospace Industries

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @08:10AM from the hackers-want-spaceships-with-lasers dept.

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Researchers have identified a strain of malware that's being used in a string of targeted attacks against defense contractors, government agencies and other organizations by leveraging exploits against zero-day vulnerabilities. The attacks may have been going on since 2009 in some form and the emails containing the malicious attachments are specifically targeted at executives and officials in various industries using fake conference invitations. The attack campaign, as many do, appears to be changing frequently, as the attackers use different binaries and change up their patterns for connecting to remote command-and-control servers. The research, done by Seculert and Zscaler, shows that the attackers are patient, taking the time to dig up some information about their potential targets, and are carefully choosing organizations that have high-value intellectual property and assets (PDF)."

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Red Chinese by benjfowler · 2012-01-31 09:25 · Score: 1, Troll

It'll be the Chinese. Their get-rich-quick mentality, and the evil Chinese Communist Party's habit of indoctrinating everyone with a bullshit sense of self-righteous grievance that everything is Whitey's fault, gives then license to lie, cheat and steal. Chinese have a "shame" culture (unlike our Western "guilt" culture). There's no shame in lying, cheating, dealing drugs, adulterating food and medicine, stealing, etc in their culture -- only the shame of getting caught.
Too bad we can't give them a well deserved hiding, despite their extreme lack of preparedness (they're so set up to attack, their defences are hopeless), we can't do a thing about it. We could've developed a cyber-army worthy of Mordor, except the utter morons in the US Government destroyed the US hacker scene in the 1991 Operation Sundevil busts.
The solution would be very easy: do what the Chinese and Russians do: get a tacit understanding from the US government, that no American who hacks the US government or a US business will go to jail, and then let the hackers go to town. We should've done this 20 years ago.