NEWS Three hundred key business and government organisations are threatened by a wave of data-stealing attacks from Asia, the government has warned.
According to the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC), hackers in East Asia have developed Trojan horse programs that attempt to steal information from certain parts of the critical national infrastructure (CNI). The CNI is made up of finance, transport, telecoms, energy and government bodies.
A report from the NISCC said: "Parts of the UK's critical national infrastructure are being targeted by an ongoing series of email-borne electronic attacks. While the majority of the observed attacks have been against central government, other UK organisations, companies and individuals are also at risk."
The Trojans can infect computers through emails or websites. The emails are usually spoofed and appear to be from news or government agencies.
Companies running Microsoft software are most vulnerable to the attacks, the NISCC said. It added that the Trojans differ from previous attacks but didn't give any further information.
Roger Cumming, director of the NISCC, said the attacks have been happening for some months. He told silicon.com: "We cannot say hand on heart and identify who is doing this. In order to name countries and shame them we'd need evidence that stands up in court. This is different from the stuff you've been seeing - it's industrial strength. We reached a point where if we were to assist UK [business], we needed to make [them] aware of this.
"We've worked hard to get this information into the public domain as quickly as possible. The majority of attacks exploit known vulnerabilities. If there was a word to use here, it would be 'patch'."
Comments
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1. Richard
"Black-hole" the Sources:
If certain poorly regulated countries and ISPs are really responsible for these attacks, why not simply refuse all traffic from those countries and ISPs?
2. anonymous
You said
"We cannot say hand on heart and identify who is doing this. In order to name countries and shame them we'd need evidence that stands up in court."
No, but they can take a good guess and put the words "In our opinion", in front of it.
Reading between the lines, and as they are attacking Government infrastructure, my guess (In MY OPINION), is that it emanates from a terrorist source.
Now it doesnt take a great deal to work out who is on my mind, AL.
3. anonymous too
Why steal it, surely all our details can be bought from government for a pittance i.e electoral roll 2005 is now available.
Our government sells our details to marketing companies, the hackers steel it, both make money from something we paid for, but we get nada in return.