China expands cyber-spying in the U.S.: article

[amborin]

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Attacks like that cited in the report hew closely to a blueprint frequently used by Chinese cyberspies, who in total steal $40 billion to $50 billion in intellectual property from U.S. organizations each year, according to U.S. intelligence agency estimates provided by a person familiar with them.

"Modern-day espionage doesn't involve cloak and dagger anymore," said Tom Kellermann, a vice president at Core Security Technologies, a cybersecurity company. "It's all electronic."

In the highly organized cyberspy scheme that drained valuable research and development information from a U.S. company, the report said, the hackers "operated at times using a communication channel between a host with an address located in the People's Republic of China and a server on the company's internal network."

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In the months leading up to the 2007 operation, cyberspies did extensive reconnaissance, identifying which employee computer accounts they wanted to hijack and which files they wanted to steal. They obtained credentials for dozens of employee accounts, which they accessed nearly 150 times.

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The hackers copied and transferred files to seven servers hosting the company's email system, which were capable of processing large amounts of data quickly. Once they moved the data to the email servers, the intruders renamed the stolen files to blend in with the other files on the system and compressed and encrypted the files for export.

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