郑州二十九中校长:The Massive Cyber Attack on ... IMF

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/07/14 13:37:20

The Massive Cyber Attack on ... IMF


It seems like the cyber attack is going global, getting frequent and targeting prominent international institutions. This time, it is IMF's turn --


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2011-6-13 09:39


I.M.F. Reports Cyberattack Led to ‘Very Major Breach'


The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a new leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.


The fund, which manages financial crises around the world and is the repository of highly confidential information about the fiscal condition of many nations, told its staff and its board of directors about the attack on Wednesday. But it did not make a public announcement.


Several senior officials with knowledge of the attack said it was both sophisticated and serious. “This was a very major breach,” said one official, who said that it had occurred over the last several months, even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who ran the fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a chamber maid in a New York hotel.


Asked about the reports of the computer attack late Friday, a spokesman for the fund, David Hawley, declined to provide details or talk about the scope or nature of the intrusion. “We are investigating an incident, and the fund is fully functional,” he said.


Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information. It also includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, “political dynamite in many countries.” It was unclear what information the attackers were able to access.


It is still not yet clear which informations the hackers get access to.


The attacks were likely to have been made possible by a technique known as “spear phishing,” in which an individual is fooled into clicking on a malicious Web link or running a program that allows open access to the recipient’s network. It is also possible that the attack was less specific, a case in which an intruder was testing the system merely to see what was available.


The fund said that it did not believe that the intrusion into its systems was related to a sophisticated digital break-in at RSA Security that took place in March, which compromised some information that companies and governments use to control access to their most sensitive computer systems. RSA notified its clients of the loss of its data, and last month hackers attempted to use the information stolen from RSA to gain access to computers and networks at the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest military contractor.


A major cyber attack on the IMF aimed to steal sensitive insider information, a cyber security expert said on Sunday, as the race to lead the body which oversees global financial system heated up.


Tom Kellerman, a cybersecurity expert who has worked for both the IMF and the World Bank, said the intruders had aimed to install software that would give a nation state a "digital insider presence" on the IMF network.


Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales and the biggest information technology provider to the U.S. government, disclosed two weeks ago that it had thwarted a "significant" cyber attack. It said it had become a "frequent target of adversaries around the world."


Cyber security experts said it might be difficult for investigators to prove which nation was behind the attack.


CIA Director Leon Panetta told the U.S. Congress on June 9 that the United States faced the "real possibility" of a crippling cyber attack on power systems, the electricity grid, security, financial and governmental systems.


The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is helping to investigate the attack on the International Monetary Fund, the latest in a rash of cyber break-ins that have targeted high-profile companies and institutions.


The goal of the cyber attack at the International Monetary Fund was to install software that would give a nation state a "digital insider presence" on the network, a cybersecurity expert who has worked for the IMF and World Bank told Reuters on Saturday.


"It was a targeted attack," said Tom Kellerman, who understands the network architecture at both international financial institutions and who serves on the board of a group known as the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance.





Reuters/NYTimes/Bloomberg
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