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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You see no irony in your “rebuttal” to my point being locked behind a Western paywall?
It seems clear that you’ll continue to avoid real discussion and dismiss my perspective with some conspiracy minded magical thinking regardless of how this “conversation” proceeds…
You’ve made no attempt to rationalize or justify your opposition. You’re using ad hominem attacks to imply the blanket superiority of your moral position without any logical connective tissue. “Someone has a different opinion to me? They must be a Chinese propagandist!”
If you don’t have an actual counter-argument to present, I’m not interested in indulging further.
You’re right, that’s waste of time. The topic here is a suspected Chinese espionage against Canada, we should not continue in this distraction.
See! Now THAT is how you write a response that reads like propaganda!