Thursday, 4 August 2011
A computer security firm says "CYBER CRIMINALS" or the members from the world of cyber crime have spent at least the past 5 years bu targeting more than 70 Government Entities, Non-Profit groups and Corporations around the world to steal the precious data.
McAfee Inc. said in a report on August3, 2011 that the attacks have targeted a wide range of organizations, including the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee and companies mostly in the United States. McAfee did not say who is behind the attacks but says the culprit is likely a nation state.
The report is short on specifics, as the security firm is not naming most of the victims, nor is it stating exactly what data were stolen. Most of the victims are in the U.S. Other victims were in Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and nine other countries.
U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said McAfee had informed the United Nations that its networks may have been targeted in a broad cyberattack between September 2008 and December 2010. He said the U.N.'s technical staff in New York and Geneva are analyzing logs of network activity for those periods, looking for evidence of such an attack.
But the threats McAfee's report focuses on are "much more insidious and occur largely without public disclosures," wrote Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee and the report's author.
The report comes amid a surge in high-profile hacking cases in recent months. Citigroup, Sony Corp., Lockheed Martin, PBS and others have been targeted by hackers this year.
