[August 03, 2011] 72 Organizations Infiltrated by "Audacious" Hackers: McAfee Tweet (Benzinga Lightning Feed Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) With victims including 6 U.S. Federal Government agencies, 13 defense contractors and the United Nations, security firm McAfee announced on its blog Tuesday the discovery of the largest series of cyber attacks in history. Writing for McAfee, security expert Dmitri Alperovitch expressed alarm: "We were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators." Continuing, "Although we will refrain from explicitly identifying most of the victims, describing only their general industry, we feel that naming names is warranted in certain cases, not with the goal of attracting attention to a specific victim organization, but to reinforce the fact that virtually everyone is falling prey to these intrusions, regardless of whether they are the United Nations, a multinational Fortune 100 company, a small non-profit think-tank, a national Olympic team, or even an unfortunate computer security firm." McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking in March, which was inadvertently discovered when it seized a server in a 2009 security breach investigation. It's thought that much of the hacking activity originated outside of the country, with possibilities including China, Russia, North Korea, and Eastern Europe. Alperovitch called the hacking a "historically unprecedented transfer of wealth."? He noted that national secrets, source code, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions have all been stolen. Hacking attacks have only grown in the public conscious within the past year, as high-profile targets have been taken down, including defense contractors and government agencies. Several hackers in the United States and abroad have been arrested for their roles in hacking crimes. Still, with data stolen and forever released into the Internet's abyss, it's only a matter of time before the consequences increase. Alperovitch didn't mince his words: "What is happening to all this data? ?by now reaching petabytes as a whole? ?is still largely an open question." (c) 2011 Benzinga.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published in its entirety or redistributed without the approval of Benzinga. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]