How Red October went undetected for 5 years
The beginning of the week brought us a major incident in the world of Internet security, as Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of a cyber-espionage network that could have ramifications as significant as last year’s notorious Flame virus.
Red October may have been reported for the first time on Monday, and uncovered for the first time in October 2012, but its operatives had been hacking into workstations and stealing highly sensitive data from governments, diplomatic bodies, research centres, oil companies, military organisations and more, since 2007.
“Spying on so many things for more than five years really shows that they knew what they were doing,” said Director of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis, Magnus Kalkuhl, when discussing the work of the Red October attackers with ITProPortal. The perpetrators were meticulous in their harvesting of information and user credentials, using the data for specifically customised (targeted) attacks that were few in number and clinical in execution, and thus extremely hard to trace.
