Threat Report: Security for Intellectual Property at Global Fortune 2000 Widely Compromised

McAfee’s VP of Threat Research Dmitri Alperovitch made waves last week with the release of the McAfee’s report on “Operation Shady Rat,” implicating the Chinese (in every way but by name) in a campaign of global hacking on a range of companies involved in everything from weapons' design to oil and gas exploration to the Olympics’ World Anti-Doping Association.

Released to coincide with last week's Hacker Conferences in Las Vegas, McAfee’s Alperovitch introduces the report, as a five-year long investigation, by summarizing the vulnerability of major firms, “I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.” Alperovitch’s blog does move, but you may be able to link to it here. Or read the full report, here.

Alperovitch states in the report, which also lays out specifics for the espionage methods used by Operation Shady Rat and others:

“What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has “fallen off the truck” of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.”