It has been revealed that more than a dozen global telecom companies have been victims of cyber attacks from a hacking group known as APT10, who have been previously linked to the Chinese government.
The massive cyber attack targeted cloud service providers from all over the world in order to attain sensitive trade secrets that could boost China’s failing economy from the aftermath of the novel coronavirus.
The hacking group, APT10, has been associated with attacks dating from back in 2010 with victims that are giants in the industries of the cloud and technology. Some of the most notorious victims of the group have been Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, DXC Technology, NTT Data, Fujitsu, Computer Sciences Corporation, Tata Consultancy Services and Dimension Data among others.
In this latest attack by the hacker group, the companies affected were attacked from entry points into systems that belonged to several different businesses. Once the hackers were in the system, they extracted the information they needed to provide it to the Chinese government.
Discovering the security breach that had occurred in these companies was a difficult task, and once the breach had been discovered, due to the relentless manner in which the attacks were done, those affected had little they could do to defend themselves against these attacks.
During this attack, companies such as Sabre, which is a booking and reservation system company that works with tens of thousands of hotels all over the world suffered a security breach that could have revealed travelling information of US government officials and other important corporate executives.
The acquisition of such information would be the perfect opportunity for China to resort to physical surveillance or an attempt to install digital tracking tools into the officials’ travelling accommodations and devices.
Another notorious victim of the cyber attack was Huntington Ingalls Industries, an American military shipbuilding company whose data proves to be of the utmost importance. The company, which has its headquarters in Newport News, Virginia works building nuclear submarines, military ships and providing professional services for the United States government and other international clients in the industry.
Another victim of the breach was Ericsson, who has been one of the biggest Huawei Technologies competitors in the race to build the infrastructure needed for a 5G network. It is said by high-ranking Ericsson members that the attack towards the company was persistent and aggressive, according to Reuters.
Due to the behaviour of the hackers, it is known that the hackers knew when they had been detected as intruders and knew what to do. They also possessed full knowledge regarding where to retrieve the most sensitive information from.
It has been announced that not all of the attacks were as well-planned and clever, however they all used expletive comments mocking anti-virus software and even the United States national security agency.
Although the cyber attacks have been confirmed, none of the victims have spoken publicly about the information that was accessed by the hackers. The Chinese government also denies any claims of being linked to the cyber attack.
