LupusDei
curious alien
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2017
- Posts
- 4,244
When the hack of Solar Winds Orion was discovered, Trump wailed "Chinese, they could be Chinese" in failing attempts to protect his boss in Moscow.
Well, the second concurrent attack, discovered by analytics at Solar Winds and at the time described as significantly more amateurish and not as penetrating, is now associated with... yep, Chinese.
Suspected Chinese hackers used SolarWinds bug to spy on U.S. payroll agency
Well, the second concurrent attack, discovered by analytics at Solar Winds and at the time described as significantly more amateurish and not as penetrating, is now associated with... yep, Chinese.
Suspected Chinese hackers used SolarWinds bug to spy on U.S. payroll agency
The software flaw exploited by the suspected Chinese group is separate from the one the United States has accused Russian government operatives of using to compromise up to 18,000 SolarWinds customers, including sensitive federal agencies, by hijacking the company’s Orion network monitoring software.
Reuters was not able to establish how many organizations were compromised by the suspected Chinese operation. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations, said the attackers used computer infrastructure and hacking tools previously deployed by state-backed Chinese cyberspies.
SolarWinds said it was aware of a single customer that was compromised by the second set of hackers but that it had “not found anything conclusive” to show who was responsible. The company added that the attackers did not gain access to its own internal systems and that it had released an update to fix the bug in December.
Although the two espionage efforts overlap and both targeted the U.S. government, they were separate and distinctly different operations, according to four people who have investigated the attacks and outside experts who reviewed the code used by both sets of hackers.
Reuters could not determine what information the attackers were able to steal from the National Finance Center (NFC) or how deep they burrowed into its systems. But the potential impact could be “massive,” former U.S. government officials told Reuters.
The NFC is responsible for handling the payroll of multiple government agencies, including several involved in national security, such as the FBI, State Department, Homeland Security Department and Treasury Department, the former officials said.