Gory Details Of Recent Google Hack

Wired has just published an amazing article detailing a gory report on how Google and other unlisted major companies were hacked.

I just finished an audiobook called The Scarecrow via Audible and it was a good fiction.

But, this Wired article is so much more real and in some ways insane if you think about the silent under the radar attacks that’s going on against corporations around the world.

I highly recommend you read the whole article at Wired. But this what I came away with after reading it.

• Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) – A new form of attack that can lay dormant in a corporate network for months even a year before coming alive and avoid detection.
• APT like data theft unlike other threats which target financial and identity theft
• No one is immune to APT attackers – including defense contractors and government agencies
• APT attacks are sophisticated but initial entry is very simple using social engineering
• Spear-phishing attacks target key executives, assistants, researchers and admins who have access to sensitive information
• Also use 2 other methods of infection – process injections and stub malware
• They use very hard to detect ways of sending data home – gather data in a staging server, slice the data into small rare packets, sometimes even using customized packers, packets with spoofed headers or even use the SSL port with a custom protocol.
• APT victims can only hope for a 3-6 months window before the attackers return

After reading this article, I came away with a sobering feeling of the always connected to the Internet we live in now.

Google came out and openly said that they were hacked but many of the major corporations didn’t.

I rarely wear a tin foil hat but sometimes stuff like this makes you wonder.