Darknet recently covered an interesting article written by The Register (UK) involving a phishing attack conducted against the White House on the 1st of this month. Since it’s National Cyber Awareness Month, I figured this issue is timely and relevant. The pieces can be found here:
Hackers break onto White House military network @ The Register
Hackers Break Into White House Military Network @ Darknet.co.uk
A spear phishing attack is like any phishing attack but executed through the use of email. The attacker poses as a trusted party and obtains credentials from his/her victims in order to exploit them and the systems they have control over. As mentioned in the Neuralhub piece entitled “DNS Threats and Security Solutions,” one can can also employ other forms of social engineering attacks, such as a Credential Harvester attack, to gain sensitive information in this manner.
Another form of credential-stealing attack mentioned on the blog would be Session Hijacking which I mentioned in mentioned in this neuralhub piece.
This spear phishing attack, conducted via a Chinese network, was successful in accessing a highly sensitive network (the White House Military Office) which does everything from arrange hospitality services to “send and authenticate nuclear strike commands” (The Register, not me, I can’t claim to know whether or not this is true but it sounds unrealistic since they also mention that the network is “unclassified”). Apparently some form of attachment and/or malware was used to prep the system in question for the attacker.
Apparently no sensitive information was obtained by the attacker and that attack was halted before anything of note was accomplished.
As always with posted links, I highly encourage you to read about the issue directly from the sources cited above for greater depth.