Of course, this is not an unusual scenario for a more sophisticated type of non-government hacker.
Often the foreign government is also searching for the file of password hashes- password dumping-so that it can do a reverse lookup and then hack into these accounts remotely. The C2 servers instruct the backdoor to perform some simple commands, which can include walking a file system and then exporting data that is considered interesting. This bit of malware then contacts the foreign government’s command and control ( C2) server. This is a particular source of a threat if the employee is working remotely. The breach incidents most likely go something like this: a user sitting at a desk somewhere-Fortune 500 company, defense contractor, research university-falls for an email phishing attack in which a backdoor is loaded onto the user’s computer.
As the DBIR notes, these 121 breaches are based on well-rehearsed exploits in which certain actions almost always appear. In the table above are listed the top six attack mechanisms used by state hackers. Exploit Methodsīy analyzing these sources of information on the methods used by government hackers, and by slicing the raw data that DBIR provides, we can provide a little more insight into these government-orchestrated attacks. Since the release of the weapon in 2010, many analyses have performed post-mortems on the virus, in order to reveal the capabilities of government hackers. Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it escaped the digital realm to wreak physical destruction on equipment the computers controlled. Stuxnet was unlike any other virus or worm that came before. The canonical example of this is Stuxnet, a weapon developed by the US military to sabotage uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran. The third source of information comes from cyber weapons that have been caught “in the wild”.
The analysis highlights a shocking series of security failures at one of the world’s most secretive entities, but the underlying weaknesses that gave rise to the breach also, unfortunately, are all too common in many organizations today. Back in 2016, Wikileaks published a huge portfolio of CIA reports known as Vault 7, and these provide an interesting insight into the methods used by the US government. This report indicates that government hacking has increased significantly over the past few years, and details the most common methods used by government hackers:Īnother source of information on government hacking has come from leaks from the US government. One source of information on this is generously provided by Verizon as part of its annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). There are, however, some ways of finding out a little about how government hackers operate. Secondly, each government has different motives when it comes to launching attacks, and therefore uses different tactics. One is that the methods that government hackers use are cloaked in secrecy. When it comes to describing the exploits and tactics used by government hackers, we are faced with two difficulties. Top Exploit Methods Used by Government Hackers As we’ll see, these practices are extremely common. national security or law enforcement agencies or private actors on their behalf) exploiting vulnerabilities in systems, software, or hardware to gain access to information that is otherwise encrypted, or inaccessible.
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