It was revealed on Tuesday, by FireEye which is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the US that it had been hacked. It said that it was likely that a government had done this and hacking tools that were used to test the defenses of its clients had been stolen.
FireEye’s hack can be said to be the most significant breach in recent history. This company has a number of contracts spanning the national security space in the United States and its allies. After news of this breach broke out, the company’s shares dropped by 8% in the after-hours trading. In a blog post by the company, it was declared that “red team tools “were stolen. This they claimed could be part of a government backed hacking operation that had used absolutely mew techniques to so do.
It was not very clear though as to when exactly the hack took place. It was informed by reliable sources though that the company had been over the past two weeks been resetting user passwords.
Apart from the tools theft it was mentioned that the hackers displayed an interest in government agencies that were a subset of the FireEye customers.
Matt Gorham, who is the assistant FBI director for the Cyber division mentioned that the FBI was investigating and the preliminary investigations show a high degree of sophistication that matches a nation state.
It was disclosed by a former defense department official who is aware of this case that Russia tops the list of suspects. Russian interference had been a prime concern during the run-up to the US elections. Some Russian hacking techniques were exposed by US officials.
The other security companies that have been hacked earlier include Bit9, RSA and Kaspersky.
The objective seems to be the collection of valuable intelligence that proves to be helpful in defeating security countermeasures that can go towards hacking of organizations all over the world.
