Chinese Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

According to report published by for the Defense Department and government and defense industry officials, Chinese hackers have gained access to the designs of many of the nation's most sensitive advanced weapons systems. The compromised U.S. designs included those for combat aircraft and ships, as well as missile defenses vital for Europe, Asia and the Gulf, including the advanced Patriot missile system, the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense systems, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The report comes a month before President Obama meets with visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping in California. The report did not specify the extent or time of the cyber-thefts, but the espionage would give China knowledge that could be exploited in a conflict, such as the ability to knock out communications and corrupting data. For the first time, the Pentagon specifically named the Chinese government a

Secret and highly sensitive and $630 million building blueprints outlining the layout of Australia's top spy agency's new headquarters have been stolen by Chinese hackers. According to a report by the ABC 's Four Corners, the blueprints included floor plans, communications cabling, server locations and the security systems. The cyber attack, launched on a contractor involved in work at the site, is one of the reasons completion of the new building has been delayed. Companies including BlueScope Steel and Adelaide-based Codan, which makes radios for military and intelligence agencies, are also said have been targeted by the Chinese. Under this major hacking operations, hackers successfully breached the Defence Department's classified email system, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. A separate attack on the Defence Department involved an employee sending a highly classified document from his des

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

In 2010, as part of what has been dubbed as Operation Aurora , Chinese hackers infiltrated a special database within Google's systems and gained access to a sensitive database worth of information about American surveillance targets.  Google reported the hack publicly years ago, saying that the sophisticated attack resulted in the theft of Google intellectual property and the partial compromise of some human rights activists' email accounts. When the news first surfaced in 2010, Google said hackers stole the source code behind its search engine, and targeted email accounts of activists critical of China's human rights record. But recently discovered that the hackers also obtained surveillance information, including emails belonging to suspected spies, diplomats and terrorists which law enforcement officials had been monitoring. Google reported this breach to the FBI, resulting in a national security investigation. According to the sources, hackers were after the names of

Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new backdoor pieces of malware from the Winnti family, which are mainly used by a Chinese  cyber criminal group to target South East Asian organizations from the video gaming sector. Winnti malware used by hackers to hijack control of web users systems using a new backdoor contained in the legitimate Aheadlib analysis tool. Dubbed as " Bkdr_Tengo.A, " passes itself off as a legitimate system DLL file called winmm.dll. " We believe that this was done using a legitimate tool called Aheadlib, which is a legitimate analysis tool. "  wrote Trend Micro's Eduardo Altares. " The file is not encrypted and neither was it particularly hard to analyze. Its main behavior is to steal Microsoft Office, .PDF, and .TIFF files from USB drives inserted into the system. These stolen files are stored in the $NtUninstallKB080515$ under the Windows folder. It also creates a log file named Usblog_DXM.log. The files can be retrieved by

QinetiQ , a UK-based defense contractor  suffers humiliation as intelligence officials confirmed that China was able to steal the U.S. classified documents and pertinent technological information all this because of QinetiQ's faulty decision-making. QinetiQ North America (QQ) a world leading defense technology and security company providing satellites, drones and software services to the U.S. Special Forces deployed in Afghanistan and Middle East. The hacking was so extensive that external consultants ended up more or less working permanently inside the firm to root out malicious software and compromises on an ongoing basis. In one of the attacks, that took place in 2009, the hackers raided at least 151 machines of the firm's Technology Solutions Group (TSG) over a 251-day period, stealing 20 gigabytes of data before being blocked.  As the White House moves to confront China over its theft of U.S. technology through hacking, policy makers are faced with the questi

U.S. intelligence agencies traced a recent cyber intrusion into U.S. Army database that holds sensitive information about vulnerabilities in U.S. dams.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams contains information about 79,000 dams throughout the country and tracks such information as the number of estimated deaths that could occur if a specific dam failed. The database also holds sensitive information, including vulnerabilities, of every major dam throughout the country. Michelle Van Cleave, a former consultant to the CIA, told the Beacon that the data breach appeared to be part of a greater effort to collect vulnerability and targeting data for future cyber or military attacks. The Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams was hacked by an unauthorized user believed to be from Chinese government or military cyber warriors, beginning in January and uncovered earlier this month. " In the wrong hands, the Army Corps of Engineers' database cou

FireEye experts have been tracking the Operation Beebus campaign for a few months now, and new same gang of hackers are being blamed for a set of recently discovered spear-phishing attacks that aim to steal information related to American drones . These attacks exploited previously discovered vulnerabilities via document files delivered by email in order to plant a previously unknown backdoor onto victim systems. Operation Beebus is an APT-style attack campaign targeting government agencies in the United States and India as well as numerous aerospace, defense, and telecom industry organizations. FireEye Labs has linked the attacks to the China-based Comment Group hacker collective (a prolific actor believed to be affiliated with the Chines government), and Operation Beebus. " The set of targets cover all aspects of unmanned vehicles, land, air and sea, from research to design to manufacturing of the vehicles and their various subsystems. Other related malware have been discov

Chinese hackers defaced the website of the government owned Philippines News Agency (PNA) on Sunday.  Defaced page of the website was with the Chinese flag and the text: " China Hacker EvilShadow Team, We are evil shadow. We are the team. We have our own dignity China Hacker Lxxker. " The hackers shared news of the attack on Facebook. The site was back to normal after an hour. This last hacking incident comes days after the arrest of 12 Chinese fishermen suspected of poaching after their boat ran aground in a protected marine park. This was not the first time that the site was hacked. Last year , cyber attacks on several government websites were blamed on Chinese hackers during a standoff in Scarborough Shoal, a group of rocky outcrops in the South China Sea that is close to main Philippine island of Luzon.

Tibetan and Uyghur activists are once again targeted with a new malware, specially designed for Android devices. This is the first documented attack that targets Android smartphones . Security researchers at Kaspersky say they've  found a targeted malware attack on Android phones that seems to come from China. The attack relied heavily on social engineering, a kind of verbal manipulation, to hack into their targets' devices. Malware seeks to steal information like contacts, call logs, and SMS of people who work in the field of human rights. Kaspersky has identified the Trojan as " Chuli ," after a command function that shows up prior to posting stolen data to the command-and-control server at the URL: hxxp://64.78.161.133/*victims's_cell_phone_number*/process.php. On March 24, the attackers infiltrated the email account of a high-profile Tibetan activist, and used that account to send a spear-phishing email to their contacts list. Once the victim

Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced to develop a new, open-source operating system customized especially for Chinese users called ' UbuntuKylin OS '. According to the BBC, Chinese government and Canonical partner to launch its home grown operating system. China signaled its intention to move away from its dependence on western software products i.e windows. Canonical staff and Chinese researchers will be working on the OS at a Beijing lab. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will collaborate with Canonical to come up with Kylin to run on servers, aimed at websites, online shops, and hosting. The first version of Ubuntu Kylin is for the laptops and desktops. Therefore the Android dominates the Chinese market for a few more years. The Ubuntu Kylin is not for the mobile device because Canonical already has the Ubuntu Mobile OS. Future releases will also include integration with Baidu maps and shoppi

According to an exclusive report published today by DNA news, the computers of highly sensitive Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) have reportedly been hacked by Chinese hackers as biggest security breach in the Indian Defence ever. Infiltrate leading to the leak of thousands of top secret files related to Cabinet Committee on Security, which have been detected to have been uploaded on a server in Guangdong province of China. Indian Defence Minister A K Antony said, " Intelligence agencies are investigating the matter at this stage and I do not want to say anything else. " " The leak was detected in the first week of March as officials from India's technical intelligence wing, National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), working with private Indian cyber security experts cracked open a file called "army cyber policy". The file had been attached to hacked email accounts of senior DRDO officials that quickly spread through the system in a matter of

If hackers want to get into your computer network, they will find a way. You can make it harder but you can't stop them. According to  Australian Financial Review report on Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was hacked by hackers who infiltrated its networks and allegedly stole information using a Chinese piece of malware. After investigations they found multiple computers had been compromised by malicious software seeking intelligence. Several RBA staffers including heads of department were sent the malicious emails over two days, but it isn't known if the malware executed and succeeded in capturing information from the compromised computers.  The malware consisted of a web address that linked to a zip file that contained a Trojan which at the time was not detected by the anti-virus program, according to the bank.  A Defence department spokesperson said: " The government does not discuss specific cyber incidents, activities or capabilities. [Doing so] could jeopardise

Chinese search engine Baidu has just launched a security product called Baidu Antivirus 2013 . Described as a ultra light weight, easy to use, extremely fast anti-virus program that promises to protect your system from malware, viruses, spyware, adware and other malicious programs. Most interesting thing is that Baidu Antivirus comes only in English. Back in January, Baidu launched Baidu PC Faster, a software suite designed to fix speed and performance issues. The program combines the Baidu Antivirus Engine and Baidu Cloud Security Engine with the Avira Antivirus engine to provide you with complete protection against all online threats. " Baidu Antivirus offers an easy to use interface with several advanced configuration options as well as quarantine of infected files. It also has an extremely small memory footprint, so you can actually do other things while it is running on your computer. Other features include automatic updates, Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS), scan r

Microsoft has become the latest victim of to Cyber attack and confirm that small number of its computers, including some in its Mac software business unit, were infected with malware . Microsoft added , malicious software used in a cyber attack is very similar to those experienced by Facebook and Apple recently. Microsoft gave few other details about the break-in, " We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing. " " During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing, " Microsoft said. " This type of cyber attack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries ," the company said. Last week, Apple said its

Few weeks after the discovery of the sophisticated cyber espionage campaign against principal US media The Mandiant® Intelligence Center ™ released an shocking report that reveals an enterprise-scale computer espionage campaign dubbed APT1. The term APT1 is referred to one of the numerous cyber espionage campaign that stolen the major quantity of information all over the world. The evidences collected by the security experts link APT1 to China's 2nd Bureau of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department's (GSD) 3rd Department (Military Cover Designator 61398) but what is really impressive is that the operation have been started in the distant 2006 targeting 141 victims across multiple industries. During the attacks the attackers have took over APT1 malware families and has revealed by the report APT1′s modus operandi (tools, tactics, procedures) including a compilation of videos showing actual APT1 activity. The Mandiant has also identified more than

Facebook operator of the largest social network with more than 1 billion members, said on Friday it had been the target of an unidentified hacker group, but that no user information was compromised during the attack. The attack occurred when a handful of the company's employees visited a developer's compromised website, which led to malware being installed on their laptops. ' Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack ,' read the statement , despite the laptops being ' fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. ' Reports say Facebook knew about the attacks, which likely exploited a zero-day Java software flaw, well before the announcement. " We are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the

The New York Times says Chinese hackers probably working for the military or Chinese government have carried out sustained attacks on its computer systems, breaking in and stealing the passwords of high-profile reporters and other staff members. For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times . On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal announced that it too had been hacked by Chinese hackers who were trying to monitor the company's coverage of China. It said hackers had broken into its network through computers in its Beijing bureau. " The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them " " Evidence shows that infiltration efforts target the monitoring of the Journal's coverage of China, and are not an attempt to gain commercial advantage or to misappropriate customer information, " the statement rea

Japan ministry become the recent victim of a cyber attack through a malware that suspected to have compromised and sent overseas more than 3,000 confidential documents from the ministry, including many on global trade negotiations. After investigation, experts found that Hackers use "HTran" the Advanced Persistant Threat (APT) exploit kit for attack. Computers at country's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery suspected to be infected from this. HTran is a rudimentary connection bouncer, designed to redirect TCP traffic destined for one host to an alternate host. The source code copyright notice indicates that HTran was authored by "lion", a well-known Chinese hacker and member of "HUC", the Honker Union of China. A lot of the documents were about the negotiations over the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership multilateral trade pact. According to a report from SecureWorks, Dell's security division, in 2011 that the malware is believed to have b

Web site for the Council on Foreign Relations was compromised and recently hit by a drive-by attack that was detected earlier this week. Hacker are suspected to be from China , who are exploiting a zero day  Internet Explorer vulnerability for Cyber Espionage attack against one of American most elite foreign policy web groups. According to Fireeye  researchers, a malicious content on the website was hosted by hackers, that is exploiting Internet Explorer version 8.0 (fully patched version) to hack windows systems of visitors. " We have chosen not to release the technical details of this exploit, as Microsoft is still investigating the vulnerability at this time. "  Once the system compromised, hackers look for valuable information from their computers, kinda Cyber Espionage. The FBI was notified of the attack and is said to be investigating. The CFR is one of the most elite foreign policy organizations in the United States with a membership of some 4,700 officials, former

We have seen for the past couple years the cyber wasteland become something that is not dominated by young ambitious hackers anymore. The age of the Wild West is over and the big boys want a piece of the action. With so many infrastructures connected to the web these days it is only natural for more powerful and interested concerns to take their skills to the web. We are seeing the beginnings of true cyber war and it is something that is not going to be stop anytime soon. In the past, what we have seen mostly is governments stay behind the scenes and do defense when it comes to the cyber war. If the government did go on the offensive it would be in secret only discovered when some security firm would get lucky and find some code that would hint to government influence . But these days it is not like that anymore. Everyone knows that the governments of the world are going all out when it comes to cyber war. And the worst part about it is that when it comes to regular civilian