Chinese fingerprints found on Google breach

NY Times:

An American computer security researcher has found what he says he believes is strong evidence of the digital fingerprints of Chinese authors in the software programs used in attacks against Google.

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In the week since the announcement, several computer security companies have made claims supporting Google’s suspicions, but the evidence has remained circumstantial.

Now, by analyzing the software used in the break-ins against Google and dozens of other companies, Joe Stewart, a malware specialist with SecureWorks, a computer security company based in Atlanta, said he determined the main program used in the attack contained a module based on an unusual algorithm from a Chinese technical paper that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language Web sites.

The malware at the heart of Google attack is described by researchers as a “Trojan horse” that is intended to open a back door to a computer on the Internet. The program, called Hydraq by the computer security research community and intended to subvert computers that run different versions of the Windows operating system, was first noticed earlier this year.

Mr. Stewart describes himself as a “reverse engineer,” one of a relatively small group of software engineers who disassemble malware codes in an effort to better understand the nature of the attacks that have been introduced by the computer underground, and now possibly by governments as well.

“If you look at the code in a debugger you see patterns that jump out at you,” he said. In this case he discovered software code that represented an unusual algorithm, or formula, intended for error-checking transmitted data.

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This is good forensic work on unraveling how the attack was done and giving clues to who was responsible. Pushing deeper into the evidence surrounding the attacks on Google and others should reveal a pattern.

We still need to get to the point where we can also walk back the cat on the Zombies used in the attack and get back to the source of the attacks.