uscyberlabs

• January 14- U.S. warns on China cyber, anti-satellite capability -“Advances by China’s military in cyber and anti-satellite warfare technology could challenge the ability of U.S. forces to operate in the Pacific, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday during a visit to Japan.

• February 4- China Attacks British Government Computers – William Hague told a security conference in Munich that the FO repelled the attack last month from “a hostile state intelligence agency”. Although the foreign secretary did not name the country behind the attacks, intelligence sources familiar with the incidents made it clear he was referring to China. The sources did not want to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the issue.

• February 9- Oil Firm Hit by Hackers From China Report Says - Western energy firms have been targeted in cyber espionage attacks, apparently orchestrated by hackers working from inside China, the Wall Street Journal reports:

• February 17- Journalists Under Online Attack, in China and Beyond – In March, Andrew Jacobs, a correspondent working for The New York Times in Beijing, peered for the first time into the obscure corners of his Yahoo e-mail account settings. Under the “mail forwarding” tab was an e-mail address he had never seen before. That other e-mail address had been receiving copies of all of his incoming e-mails for months. His account had been hacked.

• February 17- Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government an “unprecedented” cyber attack on Canadian government computers has been traced back to computers in China. From CBC: The attack, apparently from China, also gave foreignhackers access to highly classified federal information and also forced the Finance Department and Treasury Board — the federal government’s two main economic nerve centre’s — off the Internet.

• March 10- Spy chief: China’s cyber abilities worry U.S.-WASHINGTON — China’s growing capabilities in cyber-warfare and intelligence gathering are a “formidable concern” to the United States, the top U.S. intelligence official told a Senate panel Thursday.

• April 5- Spying on Computer Spies Traces Data Theft to China – The Toronto spy hunters not only learned what kinds of material had been stolen, but were able to see some of the documents, including classified assessments about security in several Indian states, and confidential embassy documents about India’s relationships in West Africa, Russia and the Middle East. The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages.

• April 19- Rio, BHP, Fortescue Hit by China Computer Hackers, ABC Reports – Rio Tinto Group faced cyber attacks from China at about the time of the arrest of four executives in the country, while BHP Billiton Ltd. and Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. have also been hit, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.

• April 29- Glass Dragon: China’s Cyber Offensive Obscures Woeful Defense. Kaspersky Labs’ Threat Post reports thatChina’s online defenses have failed to keep pace with its widely hyped offensive capabilities: For the last 18 months, Dillon Beresford, a security researcher with testing firm NSS Labs and divorced father of one, has spent up to seven hours a day of his spare time crawling the networks of China’s state and provincial governments, as well as stealthier networks belonging to the PLA and the country’s top universities. Armed with free tools like Metasploit and Netcat, as well as Google Translate, he’s pulled back the curtains on the state of cyber security in China. What he’s discovered may come as a surprise to many U.S. policymakers and Pentagon officials.

• March 19- EMC –RSA - In an open letter, RSA executive chairman Art Coviello revealed that the information was stolen via an APT (advanced persistent threat) attack. “While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, [it] could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack,” he wrote.

• May 7- China’s Spying Seeks Secrets US Info - China is ramping up espionage efforts in the United States. One key component of their strategy is to recruit U.S. citizens to join clandestine defense organizations and pass along information to Chinese handlers. From the Associated Press: He had been a seemingly all-American, clean-cut guy: No criminal record. Engaged to be married. A job teaching English overseas. In letters to the judge, loved ones described the 29-year-old Midwesterner as honest and caring—a good citizen. His fiancée called him “Mr. Patriot.”

• May 25- China Confirms Existence of Elite Cyber-Warfare Outfit the ‘Blue Army’ China set up a specialized online “Blue Army” unit that it claims will protect the People’s Liberation Army from outside attacks, prompting fears that the crack team was being used to infiltrate foreign governments’ systems.

• May 30- China’s cyber squad is for defense – Blue Army -At a rare briefing, China’s defense ministry spokesman, Geng Yansheng, announced that the 30-strong team was formed to improve the military’s security, the Beijing News reported Thursday.

• May 5- Lockheed Martin – the largest provider of IT services to the U.S. government and military, suffered a network intrusion stemming from data stolen pertaining to RSA. It seems that the cyber-thieves managed to compromise the algorithm used by RSA to generate security keys. RSA will have to replace the SecurID tokens of more than 40 million customers around the world, including some of the world’s biggest companies.

• May 19- Norwegian Military – The attack happened when 100 senior military personnel received an email in Norwegian with an attachment. The attached file was in reality a Trojan designed to steal information. At least one person opened the attachment, but the attack was a failure and no data was lost.

• May- Citigroup – revealed that information for more than 360,000 U.S. credit card accounts had been compromised by a website hack. The worst thing about this attack is the fact that the data thieves did not even have to hack a server,

• June 22- China Restricts Popular Report-a-Bribe Websites – Chen’s website — http://www.ibribery.com — drew 200,000 unique visitors in two weeks. Its anonymous posts wrote about bribing everybody: officials who demanded luxury cars and villas to police officers who needed inducements not to issue traffic tickets. Some ousted doctors receiving cash under the table to ensure safe surgical procedures. Mainstream media spread word about the site, amplifying the outrage among netizens.

• June 24- China Opens String of Spy Schools – Since 2008, theChinese government has opened a string of National Intelligence Colleges on campuses around the countryin an effort to improve the skills of the nation’s spies. The Telegraph reports: The move comes amid growing worries in the West at the scale and breadth of Chinese intelligence-gathering, with MI5 saying that the Chinese government “represents one of the most significant espionage threats to the UK”

• June- IMF – said it had been targeted by a sophisticated cyber-attack for months, even though the organization has made no public statement about the motivation behind it. The nature of the information stored by the institution would seem to indicate that this was a targeted attack

• June – European Space Agency – hacked into and a lot of information was stolen and made public. This data included user names, FTP accounts and even FTP login details stored… in plain text files!