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Wednesday December 09, 2020
“Shot from a sniper”
Aggressive Hacker Attack on Fire Eye
Fire Eye experts are the first point of contact when US government agencies or companies are targeted by cyberattacks. Now hackers are invading themselves. American security circles suspect that the Russian secret service is behind this.
The computer security company Fire Eye, which, among other things, the US authorities often turn to in cyberattacks, has become a target for hackers. The company announced that it also stole the attack software that Fire Eye often uses to test its clients’ defense systems. It is not yet clear whether these tools should be used for hacker attacks. So far, Fire Eye has seen no evidence of this. However, antidotes have been developed to protect against it.
Additionally, the attackers were interested in information about the company’s government clients, Fire Eye boss Kevin Mandia wrote in a blog post. So far, it does not appear that they have been able to access customer data from storage systems.
Fire Eye assumes that hackers acting on behalf of the state are behind the attack, Mandia emphasized. This was indicated by the technical skills and discipline of the attackers, among other things. Fire Eye ignited the Federal Police FBI. The “Wall Street Journal” reported, citing investigators, that hackers in the Russian secret service milieu are currently considered possible perpetrators.
“World-class skills specially designed”
It could be one of the groups that stole emails from the Democratic Party in the 2016 US election campaign. The publication of the emails had hurt Donald Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. According to the researchers, the hackers used an unusual combination of attack tools, some of which are still in evidence. “It was a sniper shot that happened,” the newspaper quoted one of the investigators as saying. “The attackers adapted their world-class abilities specifically to attack Fire Eye,” Mandia said.
The stolen Fire Eye software did not contain any attack scenarios for so-called “zero-day” vulnerabilities, he said. This is the name given to security vulnerabilities that are not yet widely known. That is why they are open to the explorer and are particularly dangerous. Fire Eye experts are called in to help with particularly serious cyberattacks. This was the case, for example, of the attack on Sony Pictures at the end of 2014, which paralyzed the entire computer system of the Hollywood studio.
