Gee: “Chinese hackers linked to breach of control systems used in electric grids”

Department of Don’t Take It From Me:

The ever-entertaining NakedSecuity.Sophos.com fulfilled its daily promise by making my neck prickle. So: Telvent, prominent maker of the SCADA industrial systems control software, got penetrated, got slurped for important product information and got pwned with malware left behind.

So good. Now we can’t trust executables from Telvent until all Chinese malware is certifiably gone, and how are they going to prove that?

The criminals were identified by their fingerprints, typical comments in code that’s led to the group being called the Comment Group. And they’re part of the biggest transfer of intellectual property in human history, in which Chinese of various affiliations including political, military and criminal have hacked their way into, face it, ALL American companies.

What the general public hears about — stolen credit card numbers, somebody hacked LinkedIn (LNKD) — that’s the tip of the iceberg, the unclassified stuff. … I’ve been circling the iceberg in a submarine. This is the biggest vacuuming up of U.S. proprietary data that we’ve ever seen. It’s a machine.

Evidence indicates that at least 20 organizations have been harvested for data, many of whose secrets could give China a leg up on its path to becoming the world’s largest economy.

By all means proceed for further depressing details:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/09/27/chinese-hackers-linked-to-breach-of-control-systems-used-in-electric-grids/?utm_source=Naked+Security+-+Sophos+List&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b583018034-naked%252Bsecurity