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China has accused the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of conducting a string of cyberattacks aimed at aeronautical and military research-oriented Northwestern Polytechnical University in the city of Xi’an in June 2022.
The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre (NCVERC) disclosed its findings last week, and accused the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), of orchestrating thousands of attacks against the entities located within the country.
“The U.S. NSA’s TAO has carried out tens of thousands of malicious cyber attacks on China’s domestic network targets, controlled tens of thousands of network devices (network servers, Internet terminals, network switches, telephone exchanges, routers, firewalls, etc.), and stole more than 140GB of high-value data,” the NCVERC said.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Northwestern Polytechnical University is a “Chinese military university that is heavily involved in military research and works closely with the People’s Liberation Army on the advancement of its military capabilities.”
The agency further said that the attack on the Northwestern Polytechnical University employed no fewer than 40 different cyber weapons that are designed to siphon passwords, network equipment configuration, network management data, and operation and maintenance data.
It also said that the TAO used two zero-day exploits for the SunOS Unix-based operating system to breach servers used in educational institutions and commercial companies to install what it called the OPEN Trojan.
The attacks are said to have been mounted via a network of proxy servers hosted in Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Poland, and Ukraine to relay the instructions to the compromised machines, with the agency noting that the NSA made use of an unnamed registrar company to anonymize the traceable information such as relevant domain names, certificates, and registrants.
Besides OPEN Trojan, the attacks entailed the use of malware it calls “Fury Spray,” “Cunning Heretics,” “Stoic Surgeon,” and “Acid Fox” that are capable of “covert and lasting control” and exfiltrating sensitive…
Sept. 12, 2022
MILWAUKEE — Dr. Keke Chen, Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Marquette University Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study confidential computing solutions within scientific collaboration.
Chen’s research project, “Confidential Computing in Reproducible Collaborative Workflows,” was granted through NSF’s Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure program. NSF CICI supports research on securing scientific data, workflows and infrastructure in three focus areas: usable and collaborative security for science; reference scientific security datasets; and discovery of scientific infrastructure vulnerabilities.
“Data-intensive scientific research projects often involve multiple collaborative parties, each of which may demand confidential processing of their sensitive assets to protect intellectual property or embargoed data or algorithm sharing before publishing a paper,” Chen said. “Integrating confidential computing into reproducible scientific workflows raises significant yet not sufficiently studied challenges. This project aims to identify these unique challenges and investigate novel solutions.”
This study will focus on the efficient hardware-based confidential computing approach, trusted execution environment (TEE) for scientific data analytics applications. Researchers will look at the solutions for scientist-oriented TEE development with trade-offs between usability and security guarantees. They will also study unique attacks derived from the interplay between confidential components and a reproducible workflow to develop mitigation methods based on the attack study to ensure workflow reproducibility and security.
“This is a remarkable research opportunity for Dr. Chen to foster collaboration and innovation,” said Dr. Heidi Bostic, dean of the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences. “Dr. Chen and his research team are seeking to remove the confidentiality and privacy concerns that can stand in the way of open collaboration and collaborative science. Their research can also be extended to other confidential…