Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, VA, Aug. 4, 2010 (photo: Petty Officer Joshua Wahl/US Navy).
In a report published on Friday, cyber security company Bitdefender said it had amassed evidence of hundreds of intrusions by the hackers, including of classified government networks, over at least 12 months.
Some of the script in phishing emails and command and control infrastructure associated with the malware is in Cyrillic, Bitdefender’s report said, but the company stressed it has been unable to attribute responsibility to any particular nation state because of an almost complete lack of digital fingerprints in the code….
“It’s not sophisticated at all, it’s very simple, and it’s its simplicity which makes it so beautiful as an attack,” said Bogdan Botezatu, senior threat analyst at Bitdefender. “The [intrusions] are flagged [by defence systems] but they are not flagged as malware — and as a result, most systems dramatically downplay their significance.”