In June 2021, the US cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency put out an unusual advisory. Chinese cybersecurity company antiy told the Global Times on Tuesday that the group’s earliest cyber attacks can be traced back to 2013. It mainly targeted governments, military, and energy sectors of neighbouring countries like China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to steal sensitive data. The group was named “Confucius” by international cybersecurity insiders.
According to Li Bosong chief engineer of Anity, the group uses the command “Confucius says” to deliver its attacks. Li also said “ “This means that the hackers have studied Chinese culture during their consistent attacks on China,” noting that the group is good at using spear-phishing e-mails and phishing websites, together with unique social engineering measures to attack targets. The group’s actions are driven by political and economic profits. It steals core data or damages the key infrastructure facilities of its targets. These attacks can have a real impact outside the network. According to Antiy CERT, “it detected the group’s attacks against the Pakistani government and military facilities when it traced the attacks from the direction of the South Asian subcontinent since 2021. The group operates in the name of the working staff from the Pakistani government and sends targeted spear phishing e-mails. Once the recipients open or download the documents, Trojan horse programs are installed into the machine, stealing all the data.” The hackers install different kinds of malicious software in spear-phishing e-mails and trick the targets to open the links. Antiy has fully analyzed the samples of the group’s attacks and found that the hackers shared tools and codes with another APT group, Sidewinder.
“The attacks have caught the attention of Pakistani authorities. The Pakistani National telecom & Information Technology Security Board has issued a nationwide warning saying that hackers are sending spear phishing e-mails under the name of the prime minister’s office and called for officials and the public to stay alert and not to provide any information via emails or social media platforms.” As reported.
Cyberspace is likely to be the next theatre of contention, as the world’s leading powers weaponize IT to achieve strategic objectives. The new tool for war is cyberwarfare. Cyberwarfare isn’t the stuff of sci-fi movies anymore such as The matrix, Skyfall, V for vendetta, and black mirror. Cyber warfare is being practiced by countries across the globe. It is considered the most effective way to hobble the military and economic capabilities of their enemies and create social and cultural strife.
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The war in the current century will consist of lethal warfare, biomedical attacks, cyber warfare, and data breach. As technology is becoming the essence of modern states and their armies, war planners see cyber tools as the next generation of destructive weapons, capable of degrading the war-making capabilities of rivals.
The evil aspect of cyber warfare is that a country practicing it does not have to declare war against its enemy. For example, computer geeks can launch guerrilla phishing attacks while hiding their identity, they can steal military, and industrial intelligence and disrupt communications network hubs. All over the world, there are thousands of high-tech facilities, coders, and hackers working round the clock to mount traceable computer attacks on countries that are identified as enemies or rivals of their own or to identify such attacks and nullify them. A peculiar feature of cyber warfare is that technological advances in computer sciences do not make a country less vulnerable, on the contrary, it is probably more.
