This week, FireEye released a report detailing how Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) actors systematically attacked European ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs). Within 24 hours, the Chinese government officially responded.
Our report provides further proof that cyber espionage is a reality in today’s world. First, attackers appear to have no financial incentive to hit these targets. Instead, the goal appears to be collecting time-sensitive geopolitical information — in this case, insight into the intense international diplomacy surrounding Syria’s ongoing civil war.
FireEye was able to access just one of 23 command-and-control (CnC) servers responsible for managing cyber espionage against a handful of countries. But how many more countries were attacked? How many more CnC servers are a part of this attack campaign? Only the attackers know for sure — but the known scope of their efforts implies that this was only the tip of a much larger iceberg.
