Last Updated on May 24, 2015
There’s no day without a new high-profile cyber attack. The last victim in order of time is The White House which has confirmed to have been targeted by an unsuccessful spear phishing campaign.
According to officials, hackers linked to China’s government have tried to break into the computer network used by the White House Military Office (WHMO), the president’s military office in charge of some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive communications, including strategic nuclear commands. This is considered one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive computer networks, since it is used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands. The secrets behind the WHMO include data on the so-called “nuclear football,” the nuclear command and control suitcase used by the president to be in constant communication with strategic nuclear forces commanders for launching nuclear missiles or bombers.
The cyber attack took place earlier this month, and the hackers are believed to have used servers located in China. According to officials, this kind of attack is “not infrequent” and hence there are unspecified “mitigation measures in place” which allowed to identify the attack and isolate the system. As a consequence there is no indication that any exfiltration of data took place.
This is not the first time in which alleged state-sponsored Chinese hackers have breached (or at least have tried to breach) high-profile U.S. targets. On July, 14, 2011, The Pentagon revealed to have lost 24,000 files during a cyber attack happening in March of the same year (suspects were directed to China). On May of the same year several U.S. Defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and L-3 Communications were hit by targeted attacks carried on with compromised SecurID tokens as a consequence of the infamous RSA breach.
At this link a non-exhaustive collection of the main cyber attacks carried on by Chinese hackers, maybe it is a little old (and should be updated), in any case it is enough to understand how active the Red Dragon is inside the cyber space.
