China denies hacking high-tech weapon maker

When news of a hack against Japan's biggest weapons maker, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, broke earlier this week an obvious question was - who might be responsible?
In all, more than 80 computers and servers at the firm - which manufactures everything from warships to space rockets - were infected by malware at a variety of sites. According to some local newspaper reports, a Chinese language script was found in one of the attacks which left computers at a submarine manufacturing plant and a missile manufacturing facility compromised.
The Guardian reports that the claims of Chinese involvement were firmly denied by a spokesman from China's foreign ministry:

"The Chinese government has consistently opposed hacking activities. The law strictly prohibits this. China is one of the main victims of hacking... criticising China as being the source of the hacking attacks is not only baseless, it is also not beneficial for promoting international co-operation for internet security."

Defence officials in Tokyo are reported to be fuming that they learnt about the attacks against Mitsubishi Heavy via local media reports more than a month after they took place, rather than directly from the firm itself.
Of course, as we all know, China is routinely blamed for cyberattacks and accused of using the internet to spy on other countries. Just as routinely, China denies its involvement.
Most famously, in January 2010 Google blamed China for an attack (dubbed "Operation Aurora") after discovering that someone in the country had tried to hack into the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.
In other incidents, accusations of China-backed hacking have come from a variety of directions including India, Belgium, the Dalai Lama, the British Secret Service, the US Defense Secretary and the Australian Prime Minister.
The truth is, however, that proving the origin of a hack attack is complicated by the fact that cybercriminals can use compromised PCs owned by innocent people to act as a go-between when trying to break into someone's computer. In other words - yes, a Chinese computer might have tried to connect to yours, but it may be under the control of someone in, say, Great Britain.
We'd be naive to think that the Chinese (and just about every other country around the world) isn't using the internet for its political, commercial and military advantage, but we should be very cautious about making assumptions without having all the proof in front of us.
So far there are no reports of classified information having been exposed by the hack attack at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Hackers attack high-tech military contractor, break into submarine manufacturing plant

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Japan's biggest defense contractor, has revealed that it suffered a hacker attack in August that caused some of its networks to be infected by malware.
The firm - which is involved in a wide range of activities including space rockets, the production of jet fighters, shipbuilding, and running nuclear power plants - said that 45 network servers and 38 PCs became infected with malware at ten facilities across Japan.
The infected sites included its submarine manufacturing plant in Kobe and the Nagoya Guidance & Propulsion System Works, which makes engine parts for missiles.
The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri claimed that at least eight different pieces of malware, including some which stole data, were discovered at Mitsubishi sites.
A Mitsubishi spokesperson, however, was quoted as saying that "there is no possibility of any leakage of defense-related information at this point."
The company first noticed the attack on August 11th, and expects to have the results of an investigation into the security breach by the end of September.
If Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was targeted by hackers, the obvious question to ask is who was behind the attack and what was the motive?
Earlier this year we saw a series of cyber attacks against US military contractors, including Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications and Northrop Grumman, and US Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn publicly claimed that a foreign intelligence agency was behind a hack attack that stole classified information about a top secret weapons system.
Whoever it was who attacked Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and whatever their motive, it's clear that all organisations need to take computer security seriously.
Cybercriminals, whether state-sponsored or not, are interested in stealing sensitive information which could have more than a financial value. You would be foolish to ignore such a threat, and must ensure that your organisation has strong defences in place to reduce the risks.

DNS hack hits popular websites: Daily Telegraph, The Register, UPS, etc

Popular websites including The Register, The Daily Telegraph, UPS, and others have fallen victim to a DNS hack that has resulted in visitors being redirected to third-party webpages.
Web security tester Paul Mutton managed to capture a screenshot of what visitors to The Register saw:

Part of the message reads:

TurkGuvengligi
"Gel Babana"
HACKED
"h4ck1n9 is not a cr1m3"
"4 Sept. We TurkGuvenligi declare this day as World Hackers Day - Have fun ;) h4ck y0u"

The phrase "Gel Babana" is Turkish for "Come to Papa", and "Guvenligi" is Turkish for "Security".
Further websites which have been affected by the DNS hack include National Geographic, BetFair, Vodafone and Acer.
It's important to note that the websites themselves have *not* been hacked, although to web visitors there is little difference in what they experience - a webpage under the control of hackers.
Instead of breaching the website itself, the hackers have managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected.
DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like nakedsecurity.sophos.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn't under the control of those websites.
Because of the way that DNS works, it may take some time for corrected DNS entries for the affected websites to propagate worldwide - meaning there could be problems for some hours ahead. If you're in the habit of visiting and logging into the affected sites, you might be wise to clear your cookies so the hackers aren't able to steal any information from you.
In many ways we have to be grateful that the message displayed appears to be graffiti, rather than an attempt to phish information from users or install malware.
The question now is how did the hackers manage to change the DNS records for these sites?
Here's a statement The Register published about the incident:

Image credit: @paulmutton.
Update: The Register has tweeted that its DNS records have been returned to normal.

@regvulture
The Register

So our DNS records have been restored to normality. Still no word from our provider.

about 18 hours ago via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

As noted above, however, it may take some hours before the fix propagates around the net.