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Subject: [ISN] A Chinese Hacker's Identity Unmasked
From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews ! org>
Date: 2013-02-18 6:47:18
Message-ID: alpine.DEB.2.02.1302180047070.11970 () infosecnews ! org
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-14/a-chinese-hackers-identity-unmasked
By Dune Lawrence and Michael Riley
Bloomberg Businessweek
February 14, 2013
Joe Stewart's day starts at 6:30 a.m. in Myrtle Beach, S.C., with a peanut
butter sandwich, a sugar-free Red Bull, and 50,000 or so pieces of malware
waiting in his e-mail in-box. Stewart, 42, is the director of malware research
at Dell SecureWorks, a unit of Dell (DELL), and he spends his days hunting for
Internet spies. Malware is the blanket term for malicious software that lets
hackers take over your computer; clients and fellow researchers constantly send
Stewart suspicious specimens harvested from networks under attack. His job is
to sort through the toxic haul and isolate anything he hasn't seen before: He
looks for things like software that can let hackers break into databases,
control security cameras, and monitor e-mail.
Within the industry, Stewart is well-known. In 2003 he unraveled one of the
first spam botnets, which let hackers commandeer tens of thousands of computers
at once and order them to stuff in-boxes with millions of unwanted e-mails. He
spent a decade helping to keep online criminals from breaking into bank
accounts and such. In 2011, Stewart turned his sights on China. "I thought I'd
have this figured out in two months," he says. Two years later, trying to
identify Chinese malware and develop countermeasures is pretty much all he
does.
Computer attacks from China occasionally cause a flurry of headlines, as did
last month's hack on the New York Times (NYT). An earlier wave of media
attention crested in 2010, when Google (GOOG) and Intel (INTC) announced they'd
been hacked. But these reports don't convey the unrelenting nature of the
attacks. It's not a matter of isolated incidents; it's a continuous invasion.
Malware from China has inundated the Internet, targeting Fortune 500 companies,
tech startups, government agencies, news organizations, embassies,
universities, law firms, and anything else with intellectual property to
protect. A recently prepared secret intelligence assessment described this
month in the Washington Post found that the U.S. is the target of a massive and
prolonged computer espionage campaign from China that threatens the U.S.
economy. With the possible exceptions of the U.S. Department of Defense and a
handful of three-letter agencies, the victims are outmatched by an enemy with
vast resources and a long head start.
[...]
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