Monday, December 3, 2007

Hackers Broke Into The Rolls-Royce Network

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It has happened before, but this time, hackers bit the dust as they didn't manage to access valuable data stored on the computers. Rolls-Royce, a famous company
based on the production of luxury vehicles and airplane engines, was the victim of a Chinese hack attack targeting the private data stored on the firm's computers, "TerraNet" reported citing "The Times". According to the same website, some anonymous sources told the online publication that hackers attempted to break into the computers, but they didn't manage to reach the valuable information before being disconnected.

"The Chinese -- the People's Liberation Army -- have been up to it for a good while, but it has really come to the fore recently. They tried to get inside Rolls-Royce -- their IT systems. They did not get enough inside, but it was a sufficiently big attack to get very worried. They got to the so-called not very important information before being rooted out," the anonymous source told "The Times", according to "TerraNet".

It seems that the entire attack was based on a Trojan horse, installed into one of the computers, but nobody knows for sure how did it manage to reach the system. An interesting fact is that a Trojan horse is usually deployed by another malware/infection or directly by the user, after managing or downloading a malicious file. As we're talking about such a powerful company like Rolls-Royce, I really believe their computers were protected with some sort of antivirus, so we're now talking about the second option.

Sure, it's only pure speculation, but there have been lots of reports about companies that have been infected or attacked by hackers, after their employees visited dangerous malicious pages equipped with all sorts of infections. And even worse, some people took their workstations at home and lost all the information stored on the hard-drives, after connecting the computers to the Internet. Quite smart...

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