Who's Spear-Phishing the CEO of Mandiant?

According to this Foreign Policy article, someone spear-phished Kevin Mandia, CEO of the information security firm Mandiant, using one or more fake invoices from the company which provides his limo service. According to Mandia the name of his limousine service has never been publicly announced so the question is, how did the attacker know it?

One possibility according to Kevin Mandia is that Chinese foreign nationals have followed him to speaking engagements and observed which car service he used. Personally, I've never seen a limo with a billboard mounted to it or the name painted on the side. When I use Uber, for example, I'm given the license plate number of the driver so that I can tell which black town car is the one I'm waiting for. Usually limos and SUVs that belong to private transportation services are pretty discrete, unlike taxi cabs.

Another possibility is that the someone is targeting CEOs at companies based in MD/DC/VA metroplex with a spear phishing attack that assumes they use a particular high end car service. There's probably not more than a few dozen reputable car services, if that.

Yet another possibility is that the attack came from a disgruntled former employee or competitor with inside knowledge of the Mandiant CEO's travel preferences. I've heard that thanks to Mandiant's rapid growth, it's been actively recruiting security engineers from other companies. That's probably left a bad taste in more than one person's mouth and this might be someone's idea of getting a small measure of revenge.

Or it could be that despite Mandiant's best efforts, an attacker was able to access inside information on the company's network and he sent the email just to stir the pot.

Mandiant's security team believes that they've identified the attacker as an "advanced hacking group back in China". Such groups focus on stealing intellectual property. China, like many states, is investing money in information security research and development. Would Mandiant's intellectual property match and/or accelerate China's own InfoSec R&D priorities? If so, that would be yet another explanation for this attack.

The bottom line is that no one is immune from a motivated attacker; not even a leading information security company.

UPDATE (10/15/13): A reader reminded me of this article which described a Chinese group engaged in espionage-as-a-service via a significant foothold in the travel and tourism industry.

Comments

  1. It seems to me that since the release of APT 1, Mandia continues to try to keep its name and face in front of the press. While Mandia deserves proper respect for the release of such a report (even though in my humble opinion, better tradecraft could have been applied), it appears that the company's concern to "get the message out" is being overshadowed by press coverage and magazine covers.

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