cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/54781520
China-aligned attackers broke into the networks of U.S. and Canadian universities to steal sensitive data and establish persistent access via webshells and backdoors, Proofpoint threat researchers said Tuesday.
The espionage-motivated attacks targeted physics and engineering departments, focusing on administrators and professors with national security links or organizations researching astrophysics and particle physics.
Proofpoint identified less than 10 university victims and estimates a few dozen universities may be impacted, Greg Lesnewich, principal threat researcher at Proofpoint, told CyberScoop. The company first observed the campaign in May and believes the campaign is ongoing.
“There is a high likelihood that many victims have not been made aware of this activity yet,” Lesnewich added.
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The engineering aspects do align with China’s strategic initiatives, he added.
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“China-aligned adversaries have been targeting other types of edge devices such as routers and VPN concentrators for years with various exploits to create a foothold into a target network, not using email for delivery,” Lesnewich said. “This campaign flips that on its head, using email to deliver an exploit chain to compromise a mail server, instead of using email to deliver a credential harvesting URL or malware to target an end user, not a server.”
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China is the world’s largest producer of both total and high-impact scientific literature. Chinese research institutions publish more than 1,000,000 papers annually, which is double what the next most prolific nation publishes.
Looking at the last 20 years specifically, China accounts for a 27% share of the Top 1% most cited papers, with the US coming in 2nd with a ~25% share
When accounting for raw purchasing power, China spends >$1,300,000,000,000 annually on R&D compared to the US at $1,010,000,000,000.
China is home to 24 of the top 100 science and technology clusters, delivering >7,570,000 person-years of R&D manpower annually.
As for their espionage tactics; again I fully reject the position that information and knowledge are property, so I do not see accessing those without permission as theft.
Looking at the raw numbers, and the material outcomes we all benefit from, I have more faith in China’s ability to turn knowledge into meaningful human progress than any other nation on earth.