Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/05/suckfly.html
Suckfly seems to be another Chinese nation-state espionage tool, first stealing South Korean certificates and now attacking Indian networks.
Symantec has done a good job of explaining how Suckfly works, and there’s a lot of good detail in the blog posts. My only complaint is its reluctance to disclose who the targets are. It doesn’t name the South Korean companies whose certificates were stolen, and it doesn’t name the Indian companies that were hacked:
Many of the targets we identified were well known commercial organizations located in India. These organizations included:
- One of India’s largest financial organizations
- A large e-commerce company
- The e-commerce company’s primary shipping vendor
- One of India’s top five IT firms
- A United States healthcare provider’s Indian business unit
- Two government organizations
Suckfly spent more time attacking the government networks compared to all but one of the commercial targets. Additionally, one of the two government organizations had the highest infection rate of the Indian targets.
My guess is that Symantec can’t disclose those names, because those are all customers and Symantec has confidentiality obligations towards them. But by leaving this information out, Symantec is harming us all. We have to make decisions on the Internet all the time about who to trust and who to rely on. The more information we have, the better we can make those decisions. And the more companies are publicly called out when their security fails, the more they will try to make security better.
Symantec’s motivation in releasing information about Suckfly is marketing, and that’s fine. There, its interests and the interests of the research community are aligned. But here, the interests diverge, and this is the value of mandatory disclosure laws.