Yeah, shocking, isn't it? A while back I posted about the security woes of the security vendor Barracuda. Their security devices got hacked, which exposed their customers to the Bad Guys.
It turns out that the Bad Guys were the China.gov types, and the customers were the US.gov types:
Nearly a third of organizations compromised by Chinese cyberspies via a critical bug in some Barracuda Email Security Gateways were government units, according to Mandiant.
And, the Google-owned team warned, it's not over yet: "Mandiant assesses that, at the time of writing, a limited number of previously impacted victims remain at risk due to this campaign."
By that, Mandiant means Beijing's spies not only broke into a relatively small number of organizations, via the vulnerability CVE-2023-2868 in Barracuda's products, they may still have access into those networks even after their victims took action to secure devices, by using earlier planted backdoors. Mandiant continues to recommend people dump and replace their at-risk Barracuda equipment.
It's an on-going mess, and quite frankly it's a mess that the NSA has been doing for decades to other governments. I expect that like an iceberg, what we see is only 10% of what's happening out there.
The ugly reality few will admit and most refuse to even consider is that China/the CCP has been waging asymmetrical warfare against the US...and much of the world for decades. And they aren't stopping their. They are ramping up their technical abilities for the future when they will move on to actual kinetic warfare. It's impossible to win a war you refuse to acknowledge exists. So we are losing.
ReplyDeleteThe REALLY ugly reality that few will admit is that the US government has been waging asymmetrical warfare against US, with the full cooperation of the tech industry. For example, Microsoft has given them backdoors into their software, which is why they pitched such a hissy-fit when Judge Jackson found them guilty of monopoly and proposed to break up Microsoft in response. The Western world at that time had "Five Eyes", consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US which cooperate to "save the world". What this means is that the Feds give those countries access to the Internet backbone in the US (via a room in an AT&T facility in New York) and then those country's spies go through everything they want and give the info to our Feds! "Five Eyes" is now up to "Fourteen Eyes". If you do not want them in your electronics, do not buy ANY software from a Western country.
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