Chinese State-Sponsored Hackers Evade Common Cybersecurity Tools

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ICYMI: My most recent CSO column digs into ransomware attacks on colleges and universities and how higher education institutions suffer in silence.

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Researchers at Google-owned Mandiant say that state-sponsored hackers from China have developed techniques that evade common cybersecurity tools, enabling them to burrow into government and business networks and spy on victims for years without detection.

Over the past year, Mandiant discovered hacks of systems that aren’t typically the targets of cyber espionage. Instead of infiltrating systems behind the corporate firewall, they are compromising devices on the network's edge, sometimes firewalls themselves.

The attacks routinely exploit previously undiscovered flaws and represent a new level of ingenuity and sophistication from China. Except for a widespread 2021 attack on servers running Microsoft’s Exchange email software linked to China, China’s attacks have been precisely aimed, often hitting only a han…