Operation Shady Rat. Sustained, silent, IP theft from 70 organizations across 14 countries. More. What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has “fallen off the truck” of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not new! What is new is the desperation of the Pentagon and its contractors to find a new threat justifying gross waste in the face of new taxpayer outrage over borrowing a trillion a year to pay for things we do not need and cannot afford. What most do not understand is that those nations that do industrial espionage on this scale also have the brains to devote humans to the cherry-picking task, which is non-trivial and labor intensive. CIA and NSA have never been about a sufficiency of humans–at CIA, in the early days of cyber-espionage, one reports officer walked off the job when handed a print-out of everything stolen in one pass by one device. Cyber-war is a scam, plain and simple. We should be focusing on responsible communications and computing architectures, and on open sources of information in 183 languages we don't understand. Until then, Shady Rat will continue to kick Sleeping Dog's ass.
See Also:
2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam
Reference: Bruce Schneier on Cyber War & Cyber Crime
Review: War by Other Means–Economic Espionage in America
Review: Friendly Spies–How America’s Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets
