Reuters/Rick Wilking
Fox News - July 20, 2010: A network defender works at the Air Force Space Command Network Operations & Security Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
The world's most extensive case of cyber-espionage, including attacks on U.S. government and U.N. computers, is set to be revealed Wednesday by online security firm McAfee, and analysts are speculating that China is behind the attacks.
The spying was dubbed "Operation Shady RAT," or "remote access tool" by McAfee -- and it led to a massive loss of information that poses a huge economic threat, wrote vice president of threat research Dmitri Alperovitch.
"What is happening to all this data — by now reaching petabytes as a whole — is still largely an open question," Alperovitch wrote on a blog detailing the threat. "However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat."
Analysts told The Washington Post that the finger of blame for the infiltration of the 72 networks -- 49 of them in the U.S. -- points firmly in the direction of China.
California-based McAfee would only say it believed there was one "state actor" behind the attacks, but the security firm declined to name it or many of the victims.
Targets for the intrusions -- identified from logs tracked to a single server -- included computer networks of the United Nations secretariat, a U.S. Energy Department lab, some dozen U.S. defense firms and a U.K. defense contractor. More
