The "Night Dragon" attacks, as they have been dubbed, are now being investigated by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
Starting as early as 2007, the attacks were "coordinated, covert and targeted", according to a report by McAfee, the computer security company.
McAfee said the hackers targeted five large oil and gas companies, but did not identify them by name. The attacks successfully obtained information about oil and gas field operations, including the configuration of equipment, and financial documents relating to bids for oil and gas concessions and drilling rights.
Dmitri Alperovitch, a researcher at McAfee, suggested the attacks had been commercially motivated. "The information is tremendously sensitive and would be worth a huge amount of money to competitors," he said.
He added that the attacks had occurred strictly during working hours, Beijing time, and that the hackers appeared to be like "company worker bees".
The attacks were said by McAfee to be similar to the hacking of Google in December 2009, when attackers succeeded in stealing some of the search engine's valuable source code. They also resembled a China-based espionage network discovered in 2009 and nicknamed GhostNet, that broke into the computers of diplomats, activists and businessmen and transmitted information back to the hackers.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied it is responsible for computer hacking and insisted that there are strong laws in China to punish hackers.
The Telegraph
hostgator coupon 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment