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Researchers have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in a broad range of industries, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research.
The operation uses malware to capture audio recordings of conversations, screen shots, documents, and passwords, according to a blog post published last week by security firm CyberX. Targets are initially infected using malicious Microsoft Word documents sent in phishing e-mails. Once compromised, infected machines upload the pilfered audio and data to Dropbox, where it's retrieved by the attackers. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation BugDrop because of its use of PC microphones to bug targets and send the audio and other data to Dropbox.
"Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources," the CyberX researchers wrote. "In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt, and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets. A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:26PM
So which government is the suspect de jour?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday February 23 2017, @01:27PM
> So which government is the suspect de jour?
Pretty much any of the "five eyes". This very much falls into the "slurp every single thing we can, then we can process it later" mentality of western/NATO nations, plus the NSA built that massive DC recently, which should provide the needed infrastructure.
Also I hate to say it, but every time I read about some mass malware data slurp/hack, I think "Windows", and 95% of the time I am right. When will people stop using that godawful turd of an OS already? (Not that this particular hack would have been stopped by choice of OS, might have been made harder, but they obviously had the resources and manpower to find a way in).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:26PM
With the browser converging to be the one app that people use all the time, certain people are porting spy interfaces to javascript to not leave Unix users out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:04PM
We're gonna need to do some NoScript code reviews, or make open source browsers with full real-time scripting visibility: "This script is currently accessing your camera, that one just requested file X"
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday February 23 2017, @08:21PM
I have no intention of giving my browser access to my microphone, camera or anything else.
Needless to say I am not popular with the "web is an app" crowd that want to reimplement the entire OS in the browser. Most sites don't work for me without JS, but thankfully the ones I really care about do.
I mean think about it. We have gpu access, canvas elements, file io, sockets, audio, input/output already, pretty much the core of an OS in browsers. Only thing missing is a scheduler with context switching so we can run more than one JS thread at a time, and there you go. An OS in everything but name really.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:41PM
Why limit is so? I see no reason to not also consider the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the South Africans, the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Australians, and just about any other government with a major technical infrastructure. It's not like it would take a tremendous capital investment. This doesn't mean you shouldn't consider various corporations, or even J. Random Hacker who didn't bother to properly limit his program.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:49PM
Australia is one of the 5 eyes
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @11:25PM
the NSA built that massive DC
Imagine what a huge data center must be needed to store 600 GB of recordings!
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:11PM
suspect de jour?
I dunno, but you sound suspiciously French...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @11:32PM
That's misdirection, as a real Frenchie would say du jour...unless GP is actually French but pretending to be pretending to be French.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @03:28AM
Fool! That's exactly what they want you to think!
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:03AM
Zut alors!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk