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In Cyberattack on Saudi Firm, U.S. Sees IranFiring Back
The hackers picked the one day of the year they knew theycould inflict the most damage on the world’s most valuablecompany, Saudi Aramco.
黑客选择了一年中特定的一天，他们知道这天可以给世界上估值最高的公司、沙特阿拉伯国家石油公司（Saudi Aramco，简称沙特阿美）造成最大的损失。
On Aug. 15, more than 55,000 Saudi Aramco employees stayed home from work to prepare forone of Islam’s holiest nights of the year — Lailat al Qadr, or the Night of Power — celebrating therevelation of the Koran to Muhammad.
8月15日这一天，超过5.5万名沙特阿美的员工都没有上班，在家里准备庆祝伊斯兰教一年中最神圣的夜晚之一——吉庆夜（Lailat al Qadr，又称“尊贵之夜”——译注）——据说是这一天夜里，神把《古兰经》开示给了穆罕默德。
That morning, at 11:08, a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’scomputers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructiveacts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters ofAramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with animage of a burning American flag.
那天上午11点08分，一名有高级权限，能够访问这家沙特阿拉伯国有石油公司的电脑的人在一台电脑上释放了一种电脑病毒。这是迄今为止最恶劣的公司黑客袭击事件之一。该病毒删除了沙特阿美75%的公司电脑上的数据——文件、电子表格、电子邮件、文档。取而代之的是一面燃烧着的美国国旗。
United States intelligence officials say the attack’s real perpetrator was Iran, although they offeredno specific evidence to support that claim. But the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, in arecent speech warning of the dangers of computer attacks, cited the Aramco sabotage as “asignificant escalation of the cyber threat.” In the Aramco case, hackers who called themselves the “Cutting Sword of Justice” and claimed to be activists upset about Saudi policies in the Middle Easttook responsibility.
美国情报官员称，伊朗是这起攻击事件的元凶正犯，但他们不能提供具体证据来证明其指控。国防部长利昂·E·帕内塔(Leon E. Panetta)在近日的一次演讲中对电脑攻击的危险性做出了警告，他把沙特阿美遭到攻击的事件看作是“网络威胁的一次显著升级”。在沙特阿美的案例中，黑客们自称是“正义之剑”(Cutting Sword of Justice)，还说他们是反对沙特阿拉伯的中东政策的运动分子 。
But their online message and the burning flag were probably red herrings, say independentcomputer researchers who have looked at the virus’s code.
然而，一些独立计算机研究人员在研究了病毒代码之后表示，他们在网上传达的信息和燃烧的美国国旗可能只是一个幌子。
Immediately after the attack, Aramco was forced to shut down the company’s internal corporatenetwork, disabling employees’ e-mail and Internet access, to stop the virus from spreading.
这场攻击发生之后，沙特阿美被迫立即关闭了企业内部网络，停用了员工邮箱，并阻断了互联网连接，来阻止病毒的进一步扩散。
It could have been much worse. An examination of the sabotage revealed why governmentofficials and computer experts found the attack disturbing. Aramco’s oil production operations aresegregated from the company’s internal communications network. Once executives were assuredthat only the internal communications network had been hit and that not a drop of oil had beenspilled, they set to work replacing the hard drives of tens of thousands of its PCs and trackingdown the parties responsible, according to two people close to the investigation but who were notauthorized to speak publicly about it.
后果可能会严重得多。对本次攻击事件的一项调查揭示了为什么政府官员和计算机专家都对这次攻击感到后怕。沙特阿美的石油生产运作系统与公司内部网络是相互分离的。据两位熟悉调查内容的人士透露，公司主管确定了受到攻击的只是内网，而没有石油泄露之后，便立即着手给公司的几万台电脑更换硬盘，并追查黑客。这两个人未获授权公开谈论此事。
Aramco flew in roughly a dozen American computer security experts. By the time those specialistsarrived, they already had a good handle on the virus. Within hours of the attack, researchers atSymantec, a Silicon Valley security company, began analyzing a sample of the virus.
十几名美国计算机安全专家专程飞往沙特阿美。他们抵达公司的时候，已经对病毒有了相当的了解。攻击发生之后几小时内，硅谷计算机安全公司赛门铁克(Symantec)的研究人员就开始对该病毒的样本进行分析。
That virus — called Shamoon after a word embedded in its code — was designed to do two things: replace the data on hard drives with an image of a burning American flag and report the addressesof infected computers — a bragging list of sorts — back to a computer inside the company’snetwork.
这种叫做“沙蒙”(Shamoon)的病毒——用嵌入其代码的一个单词命名——被设计来干两件事：用一面燃烧的美国国旗来替换硬盘上的数据；将受感染电脑的地址报告给公司网络内部的一台电脑——炫耀攻击的成效。 |
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发表于 2016-7-11 09:55:21