In this article, the Globe and Mail reports on the existence of a foreign entity that has been trying to steal data from more than 70 organizations including two Canadian government departments and the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal. The series of incidents were reported by McAfee, which claims to have access to log files from a command and control server used in the attacks. “Operation Shady RAT,” the company’s report on the affair, was released on Wednesday. The attackers have not been identified, however, some commentators are directing suspicions towards China given that the list of targets includes the United Nations, governments in the West and Southeast Asia, military-defence contractors, and international sports bodies that were hit around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Dr. Rafal Rohozinski, Senior Scholar at the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and CEO of the SecDev Group, told the Globe and Mail that the intrusions were not surprising given that espionage is “the world’s second oldest profession,” but what is different about it today is that “the data equivalent of the U.S. Library of Congress’s holdings can be moved overseas overnight.” This means that “collection is less a problem for hackers than sorting through the mountains of megabytes they recover.”
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