Globalization of Cyberspying: No Longer Domain of Nation States
By Karla Robinson
November 15, 2012
November 15, 2012
- Researchers at Norman Security discovered a cyberespionage campaign that targeted Israeli and Palestinian organizations for more than a year, suggesting “cyberspying is a global phenomenon and no longer mostly the domain of massive nation-states like China,” reports Dark Reading.
- “The discovery of this latest operation highlights just how popular and easy it has become to execute cyberspying. Thanks to ease of access and use of remote access Trojan (RAT) tools and reliability of social engineering, you don’t need nation-state backing to conduct these types of targeted attacks.”
- “RATs traditionally had been associated with Chinese-based attackers, but that conventional wisdom is shifting as other nations and politically motivated attackers move to cyberspying via these tools to more efficiently gather intelligence on their marks,” the article continues.
- Norman’s report did not draw conclusions on who was behind the attacks, but confirmed it was the same hacker for both.
- “We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” says Einar Oftedal, deputy CTO at Norman, referring to the global potential of cyberspying. Oftedal says the attack was not “too advanced.”
- “I believe that next year we’ll see more actors from different nations” conducting cyberespionage, says Aviv Raff, CTO of Seculert. “I think such efforts are already in place, and [we] saw that with last year’s attacks. The way I see this is that next year, more of such attacks will be discovered — meaning they are taking place as we speak but go under the radar.”
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