There’s evidence to suggest that hackers are using popular websites to attack government agencies, NGOs and other cyber espionage targets with increasingly more subtle insurgencies.
That’s according to the findings of a new report from security firm FireEye, which last month revealed details of a ten-year cyber campaign waged out of China against companies across Asia. The company’s newest dispatch sheds light on another China-based hacking group that used popular Microsoft web forum TechNet to remotely activate malware that could grant it access to an organization’s internal network and, potentially, troves of private data.
The program — run by a group known as APT17 — has since been shut down by Microsoft and FireEye. It didn’t appear to pose a threat to regular users of the website, rather TechNet was used as a seemingly legitimate medium through which the group could pull the levers necessarily to infiltrate a target.
