Southeast Asia: State Cyber Spies Operate Ten Years Undetected

For a decade, spying a group of hackers governments and companies in Southeast Asia and India. According to one report, China is said to have instructed the snooping.

In 2005, the group of hackers APT would have 30 started successfully spy on government and economic institutions in Southeast Asia and India. These have targeted political, economic and military information the attacker. In the course of journalists came into the focus of hackers. That's according to a report of IT security firm FireEye , which shines through the operation of APT 30. Responsible for Cyber ​​espionage is China, the researchers suggest.

The security researchers from FireEye have analyzed over 200 spy tools and software for planning the attacks, monitoring of targets and execution of the attacks. The tools were tailored according FireEye with clearly defined objectives. A derivative of espionage tools have successfully hidden on infected computers before anti-virus programs.

Attacked first computer behind an Air Gap

In the wake of the attacks it was the hacker group also managed to penetrate into independent, non-affiliated security reasons with the Internet company networks, as a descendant of espionage tools has spread through removable media. The infiltration of computers behind an Air Gap succeeded APT 30 FireEye According back in 2006 - the first such attacks were documented in 2008.

In order to sneak on target computers, put the hacker group on phishing e-mails with supposedly important documents in the appendix. Opened an employee a file, an espionage tool that searched the computer for relevant information and related documents sent secretly to the attackers installed.

The assumption on the part of FireEye that China is behind the espionage activities, based on the evaluation of the goals. Among other journalists were monitored, reported on the Chinese dissident movement. In addition, the graphical user interface of attack planning software was written in Chinese and also the spy tools reported Chinese terms on.