Chinese hackers launched a major attack on the U.K. Parliament earlier this month, the government’s email filtering company MessageLabs Ltd. has confirmed.
The attack, which occurred on Jan. 2, attempted to exploit the Windows Meta File (WMF) vulnerability to hijack the PCs of more than 70 named individuals, including researchers, secretaries and members of parliament (MPs) themselves.
Emails were sent to staff, with an attachment that contained the WMF-exploiting Setabortproc Trojan. Anyone opening this attachment would have enabled attackers to browse files, and possibly install a key-logging program to attempt the theft of passwords. None of the emails got through to the intended targets, MessageLabs said, but the U.K. authorities were alerted.
The WMF flaw was first made public in November and only patched by Microsoft on Jan. 5. Given that the first exploit was reported on Dec. 29, this offered the attackers a “zero day” window in which to launch the Trojan assault.
MessageLabs was reported by The Guardian newspaper — which broke the story — as saying the source of the emails had been traced to servers in China’s Guangdong Province, hence the suspicion that the latest attack was part of a more general campaign of electronic subversion.
This is not the first time the U.K. government has come under Trojan attack from China. Last summer, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) reported that U.K. government departments had been hit by a wave of Trojans originating in China.
At the time, the organization was more circumspect in attributing blame, however, describing the source in general terms as “often linked to the Far East”. There appear to be no such sensitivities this time around.
The use of targeted Trojans to carry out espionage was first reported by Techworld last May, when Israeli authorities uncovered a massive electronic spying operation by a large number of the country’s companies to steal files from their business rivals. On that occasion, the information theft had succeeded on a scale involving tens of thousands of documents.
It is hard to say who looks worst from the latest news. Microsoft Corp. will be severely embarrassed that a major customer was attacked using a flaw the company had warned of but not managed to patch. Likewise, the fact the attack is being openly attributed to China must be uncomfortable for the authorities there, who know they are assumed to approve any sophisticated use of the Internet in the country.