Security Companies Team Up, Take Down Chinese Hacking Group

daten writes A coalition of security companies has hit a sophisticated hacking group in China with a heavy blow. The effort is detailed in a report released today by Novetta. The coalition, which calls itself Operation SMN, detected and cleaned up malicious code on 43,000 computers worldwide that were targeted by Axiom, an incredibly sophisticated organization that has been stealing intellectual property for more than six years. The group united as part of Microsoft's Coordinated Malware Eradication (CME) campaign against Hikit (a.k.a. Hikiti), the custom malware often used by Axiom to burrow into organizations, exfiltrate data, and evade detection, sometimes for years.

Comments

Re:Chinese government complicity

[Registered Coward v2]

Well, 5 mod points and a dozen donuts for anyone with a solution. It's bad situation considering that U.S. and China depend on each other for business and economic reasons yet we treat each other like adversaries. The Chinese government hasn't given much historical respect to the concerns of intellectual property. When it comes to bringing hard consequences to malicious hackers in their borders they offer us zero cooperation in cases like this. So WTF do we do?

Use it to supplied bad information. Bogus code, code that fails at critical times, misinformation about deals, bargaining positions, etc. Use it as a vector to infect computers with destructive viruses that destroy data, open up their machines for penetration, or cause control systems to fail.. In short, turn the malware into a double agent.