Security Firm Says It Found Global Cyberspying

By DAVID BARBOZA and KEVIN DREW
NYT

SHANGHAI — An American cybersecurity company issued a report on Wednesday saying it had identified cyberattacks that lasted up to five years on a wide range of governments, American corporations and even United Nations groups.

The company, McAfee, said it had alerted the 72 targets it identified and also informed law enforcement agencies, which it said were investigating. The 14-page report calls the attacks highly sophisticated and says they appear to have been operated by a government body, which it declined to name.

“We’re not pointing fingers at anyone but we believe it was a nation-state,” Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president of threat research and the lead author of the report, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. China has repeatedly been the focus of suspicion in such cases.

The report comes after high-profile cyberattacks aimed at the International Monetary Fund, Sony and the Lockheed Martin Corporation, America’s largest military contractor.

(More here.)