In a report published by right-wing Washington Free Beacon, an advanced malware attack against one of America’s most powerful decision making foreign policy groups was conducted last week, in which the website of Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and its servers were infected.
The cyber experts are now investigating the attack have reveled that the attack is one of its kind and relatively new ploy called a “drive-by” website cyber attack, detected around 2:00 p.m. on 26th December.
The experts added that they suspects the Chinese hackers behind the attack in which the servers operating the CFR’s website were infected, then via infected servers the CFR members and others who visited or “drove by” the site were infected.
However, the malware was removed on Thursday, the experts believe that the attackers removed the malware themselves to prevent further tracing or the IT experts at CFR got rid of it.
“The malware was apparently pushed onto the systems of visitors via a vulnerability in Internet Explorer,” writes Softpedia’s Eduard Kovacs. “The malicious software planted on the server used Mandarin Chinese language, experts from a private security firm told the Free Beacon. Also, it appears that the attack targeted only people or intelligence related to China because the malware was configured to infect only visitors who had set their browsers to support Chinese language characters.”
EsecurityPlanet’s Jeff Goldman, writes that in an email conversation, the member of CFR David Mikhail confirmed the attack.
According to the email confirmation:
“The Council on Foreign Relations’ Web site security team is aware of the issue and is currently investigating the situation,” he wrote. “We are also working to mitigate the possibility for future events of this sort.”
Council on Foreign Relations is a powerful group that consist of elite class of the country and commonly known as the “ Shadow Government of the United States”.
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