Every company in every conceivable industry is compromised by hackers – or will be shortly – according to a report from McAfee, a major maker of cybersecurity software.
“I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact,” Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president of threat research, wrote in the report, “Revealed: Operation Shady RAT.”
“In fact,” he added, “I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.”
According to McAfee, its analysis of Shady RAT is “the most comprehensive analysis ever revealed of victim profiles from a five-year targeted operation by one specific actor.”
“This is not a new attack, and the vast majority of the victims have long since remediated these specific infections (although whether most realized the seriousness of the intrusion or simply cleaned up the infected machine without further analysis into the data loss is an open question),” it added.
The Shady RAT data thefts are just a small part of a larger picture, the report noted. “What is happening to all this data … is still largely an open question,” it acknowledged.
McAfee gathered the information for its report by cracking into a command and control server used by the hackers and accessing logs on the machine that detailed the bandits’ activity.
In its report, the company contended that Shady RAT had the fingerprints of a nation state on it. The “interest in the information held at the Asian and Western national Olympic Committees, as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency in the lead-up and immediate follow-up to the 2008 Olympics was particularly intriguing and potentially pointed a finger at a state actor behind the intrusions, because there is likely no commercial benefit to be earned from such hacks,” McAfee reported.
The report noted that the shortest time an organization was compromised was less than a month, a distinction held by nine of the targeted entities. But Alperovitch cautioned that “that this may not necessarily be an indication of the rapid reaction of information security teams in those organizations, but perhaps merely evidence that the actor was interested only in a quick smash and grab operation.”