Security firm McAfee has released data on what it is calling Operation Shady Rat, a six year sustained web attack against over 70 high profile targets, such as the US federal government, satellite communications companies, the Canadian government, the Vietnamese government, the Taiwanese government, and the Olympic Committee.
The security firm, who has decided to release the information through the somewhat informal medium of blogging, claims this has resulted in a substantial loss of wealth and information over the years. Organisations across 14 countries have been targeted.
McAfee won’t say who exactly it thinks is responsible, but there has been widepspread speculation that a nation-state, possibly China, is behind it.
Dmitri Alperovitch, who penned the piece, states: “What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has “fallen off the truck” of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.”
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