Basin motives

摘要

COMPANIES SUFFER hacking attacks on a daily basis. The most recent known victim was Honda, which announced that its computers had been locked down by ran-somware on June 9th. Stories about the firms suspected of doing the hacking, though, are rarer. Also on June 9th Citizen-Lab, part of the Munk School of Government at the University of Toronto, said that it had unearthed one of the biggest-known groups of such workaday, mercenary hackers, which it has dubbed "Dark Basin". This outfit has targeted thousands of people at hundreds of organisations all over the world, carrying out what Norton LifeLock, a cyber-security firm that worked with CitizenLab, describes as "financial, political and industrial espionage". Its targets have included company bosses, judges, journalists, members of various parliaments, government officials and ordinary people in the midst of a divorce in America, Mexico and elsewhere.