Operation Shady RAT found 72 companies hacked since 2006

By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service | Aug 4, 2011

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Security vendor McAfee published a detailed report on Tuesday about a hacking group that penetrated 72 companies and organizations in 14 countries since 2006 in a massive operation that stole national secrets, business plans and other sensitive information.

McAfee said the attackers are likely a single group acting on behalf of a government, differing from the recent wave of less sophisticated attacks from cyber activist groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, according to the report.

McAfee did not say what country might have been working with the hackers, in contrast to companies such as Google, which as recently as last month blamed China for hacking into the Gmail accounts of several high-profile U.S. officials.

The intrusions, which McAfee called Operation Shady RAT, was discovered after the security vendor gained access to a command-and-control server that collected data from the hacked computers and logged the intrusions.

"After painstaking analysis of the logs, even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," wrote Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, and author of the report.

Alperovitch wrote that over the past five to six years there has been nothing short of a "historically unprecedented transfer of wealth" due to the hacking operation.

The data stolen consists of everything from classified information on government networks, source code, e-mail archives, exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, legal contracts, SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) configurations, design schematics and more, Alperovitch said.

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