Massive cyber attack by Chinese government

Massive cyber attack by Chinese government

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25049942_mThe Penn State College of Engineering has been the target of two sophisticated cyber attacks conducted by so-called “advanced persistent threat” actors.

Experts have confirmed that at least one of the two attacks was carried out by a threat actor based in China, using advanced malware to attack systems in the college. In a coordinated response by Penn State, the College of Engineering’s computer network has been disconnected from the Internet and a large-scale operation to securely recover all systems has been launched. On 21 November 2014 Penn State was alerted by the FBI to a cyberattack of unknown origin and scope on the school’s College of Engineering.

According to HomeLand Security News Wire , a Penn State release reports that in a coordinated response by Penn State, the College of Engineering’s computer network has been disconnected from the Internet and a large-scale operation to securely recover all systems has been launched. Contingency plans have been put in place to allow engineering faculty, staff, and students to continue in as much of their work as possible while steps are taken to upgrade affected computer hardware and fortify the network against future attack. The outage is expected to last for several days, and the effects of the recovery will largely be limited to the College of Engineering.

“In order to protect the college’s network infrastructure as well as critical research data from a malicious attack, it was important that the attackers remained unaware of our efforts to investigate and prepare for a full-scale remediation,” said Nicholas P. Jones, executive vice president and provost at Penn State. “Any abnormal action by individual users could have induced additional unwelcome activity, potentially making the situation even worse.”