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Spies Hack. But the Best Spies Hack Other Spies. (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the bridge-of-spies dept.

Andrada Fiscutean, writing for BleepingComputer: When cyber spies known as NetTraveler were busy snooping on hundreds of government and military victims in 40 countries a few years ago, little did they know that another hacking group was probably watching them. During their investigation of NetTraveler, Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered an unusual backdoor that could have helped another attacker access one of their main servers, and then use the group's infrastructure or steal data. In the past five years, cybersecurity experts have encountered several cases in which espionage groups likely pilfered one another's spoils, being interested in getting both data and hacking tools. Kaspersky Researchers Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade talked about such incidents on Wednesday during the Virus Bulletin 2017 Conference in Madrid, Spain. Government hackers sometimes "obtain data by stealing it from someone else, who took it in the first place from the victims," Raiu told Bleeping Computer in an email interview before the conference. He and Guerrero-Saade believe that citizens' personal data could fall into the hands of a foreign intelligence agency that's better equipped than the domestic one. The experts based their presentation on so far unpublished research that shows how spies walk off with other spies' data and tools, gaining valuable insight into a foreign service's intelligence collection methods, recruitment tactics, procedural guidelines, and the targets operatives have to monitor.

14 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. MAD Magazine? Spy vs Spy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    MAD Magazine? Spy vs Spy?

    1. Re:MAD Magazine? Spy vs Spy? by sensei+moreh · · Score: 1

      My thought, exactly!

      --
      Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
  2. He who hacks last by bobstreo · · Score: 1

    Hacks Best.

    Or:

    Who watches the watchers?

  3. James Bond... by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 2

    From what I've learned from watching James Bond you need to replace the word "Hack" in the title to another four letter word ending in "ck".

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  4. PROTIP: Stealing from theives by i286NiNJA · · Score: 2

    It was always easier to sniff TOR, run honeypots, and google strings from popular webshells than it was to find and hack something on your own.
    One person could easily have the intrusion capability of a whole team worth of hackers. Who knows how long it takes to build a nice botnet but it takes a few hours to find one and steal it.

  5. The second mouse by DCFusor · · Score: 4, Informative

    gets the cheese.

    --
    Why guess when you can know? Measure!
    1. Re:The second mouse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      gets the cheese,

      and the early worm gets eaten.

  6. You think you're so smart by Megahard · · Score: 1

    But it's spies all the way down.

    --
    I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
    1. Re:You think you're so smart by skids · · Score: 2

      Hubris does play a role... exploit and sniffing software can sometimes be way more vulnerable than the software it targets because the authors are coming at it from the mentality of "haha these guys write horrible code I can exploit" but rely almost entirely on the idea that their tool is too obscure to have been itself exploited for their own security.

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    2. Re:You think you're so smart by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      This is a measure of bureaucratic hubris. When you do not separate attack from defence in electronics, defence will routinely fail. What happens in offence get the most funding and the best staff and the most corrupt management. Why corrupt management because it is an easy scam to look good, it is accepted that you routinely fail and rarely succeed, with those success counted way above what they actually produce. On the defence side, you get low funding and it is a dead end, you are expected to routinely succeed, in fact always succeed and any failure is a career killer. So offence any failure is fine and any rare success provides career improvement, on defence success for years is not measured but one failure and your career is over. Combine both in one house and nobody with half a brain wants to play defence, especially when the offence side lies to you and spies on you and purposefully stick holes in your security (you compete with them for funds and staff).

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  7. The term is . . . by sgt_doom · · Score: 1

    . . .fourth party collection.

    1. Re:The term is . . . by jhantin · · Score: 1

      Except the fourth party's fifth column is also up your six.

      --
      ...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
  8. Digging by Neuronwelder · · Score: 1

    So, uh, how many layers are we going to go down on spies hacking each other??

  9. And the Greatest of Spies... by Jaegs · · Score: 1

    ...hack the spies who are hacking other spies.

    And the the ultimate spy hacks that spy.