Financial Times / Reuters | May 6th 2017:
More than 500 ministries and departments hit by attacks using open-source tools
Researchers have unearthed a cyber espionage campaign that has compromised more than 500 government ministries and departments worldwide — by hiding in plain sight.
The hackers behind the attacks are waging the equivalent of guerrilla war in cyber space, using open-source tools to crack into networks and evade sophisticated cyber sentry systems trained to spot more sophisticated software.
In a report published on Friday, cyber security company Bitdefender said it had amassed evidence of hundreds of intrusions by the hackers, including breaches into classified government networks, over at least 12 months.
Bitdefender has dubbed the malware the group uses “Netrepser”.
Some of the script in phishing emails and command and control infrastructure associated with the malware is in Cyrillic, Bitdefender’s report said, but the company stressed it had been unable to attribute responsibility to any particular nation state because of an almost complete lack of digital fingerprints in the code.
Netrepser highlights two of the most worrying trends in cyberwarfare, a senior western intelligence official told the Financial Times: the increasing difficulty of identifying the source of attacks, and the growing availability of the tools used to carry them out.
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