India, UN lose battle in online war

 Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organisations including the United Nations, governments including India and the US, and companies around the world.

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one “state actor” behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; the International Olympic Committee; the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defence contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the UN, the hackers broke into the computer system of its secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data.

“Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organisations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,” McAfee’s vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report released on Wednesday.

“What is happening to all this data is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat.”

McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this year. “This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history,” he said. “The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening.”