red october

6 min read

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have released information about a large-scale cyber espionage campaign called Operation Red October (otherwise known as Rocra). The report has garnered the attention of multiple news agencies and generated many published articles since the Kaspersky report has claimed that attackers were targeting hundreds of diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in numerous countries. These reports indicate that the command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure that is used on these attacks receives stolen information using more than 60 domain names to hide its identity. Furthermore, this information appears to be funneled into a second tier of proxy servers. These are very clever attacks that many are now claiming have been taking place for more than five years! Red October is being compared with other malware that has been associated with cyber espionage such as Duqu, Flame, and Gauss.