McAfee erred Malware links for “Aurora operation”

According to Internet security firm McAfee, some malware classified as a part of Google’s attack had no connection with attacks designed to draw Google in China. In fact, the attacks infecting separately. On March 30, 2010, McAfee revealed that the first reports from the company on Google attacks, which were described as “Operation Dawn”, had several corrupted files incorrectly linked the attacks. But these files are associated with Aurora at all. Security researchers revealed that Aurora was a sophisticated intelligence operation designed to steal intellectual property core activities. Aurora operation was in connection with attacks on Intel, Google, Adobe, Symantec and other companies. The files, which were incorrectly associated with Operation Dawn in the original study from McAfee, is actually linked to an active botnet. This network of bots designed to attack computers Vietnamese activists. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of McAfee’s Threat Research, said that while investigating the operation, the company was in the fog of war sounding operations, as reported by Dark reading on 31 March, 2010. McAfee has participated in the investigation and remediation of computers at dozens of companies affected by the attacks of Aurora. Alperovitch said the company was dealing with a large number of machines and its main purpose was to identify infections. The company believes that the identification of infection would allow him to publish a wealth of information on infected machines. But when the company did more research we found that the infection was one of the attacks is quite different. Although the main function of Aurora was to steal the intellectual property of their victims, other malware attacks were not as sophisticated and concerned about the creation of botnets that can be used for distributed denial of service (DDoS). In addition, said security researchers at McAfee, the confusion about the participation of other malware attacks with machines of the victims of Aurora does not derail the forensic investigation. McAfee did not go to the wrong published so far, because it lacked sufficient data. The company apologized to other scientists working on the project to make everything clear about the facts.