Who is hacking who?
In an effort to investigate the sources of some of the most serious hacking attempts against industrial interests, cyber security expert Greg Martin from ThatStream set up a fake control computer and left it online to be hacked by criminals and world militaries. The decoy system was virtually positioned in countries around in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, and Singapore and opened to probing for three months.
Despite the reputation of China and Russia being the hottest locations from which to launch industrial hacks, the United States placed first with over 6,000 hacking attempts. China and Russia followed as being the source of over 3,500 and 2,500 hacks, respectively.
“It’s not unlikely that some probes are from security companies and academia, but the dataset is large and diverse enough that it probably includes a large amount of military organizations, if not all of them (proxied or not),” Martin wrote in an e-mail.
Is it possible that the NSA is just trying to stay ahead of its Chinese and Russian counterparts? Read more about the decoy control experiment at Bloomberg.