Latest Malware Target: AutoCAD Files

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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Someone in China seems interested enough in your AutoCAD blueprints to use malware to send your files back to a service provider in China. The initial discovery of the cyber-espionage came in February and has since spread globally through document transfers.

This appears to be a targeted espionage case, perhaps where someone wants to know about what a competitor is doing in a bidding situation, but the malware does seem to be spreading.
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Taking an educated guess, I would think it is more for them to produce the parts themselves instead of having to pay U.S. companies to make the parts.

R&D is expensive, and specialized parts show this in the price.

If you cut out R&D by stealing the blueprints and specs, whatever you are making suddendly becomes a whole lot cheaper.
 
That's not shocking at all. It's an attack vector so it was gonna get exploited sooner or later.
 
This is somewhat of a big deal. A company that works in extremely specialized parts such as for manufacturing/QA/backend area should be very worried about this. If some chinese manufacturer was able to steal their key files, it could hurt bad, real bad.
 
Good thing nobody important uses AutoCAD anymore. Replace AutoCAD with Pro/E, then you have reason for concern.
 
AutoCAD and Autodesk products are still widely used in some industries.
 
Quick! Someone make blueprints of MC Escher's drawings for China to duplicate and produce!
 
hegulator said:
Good thing nobody important uses AutoCAD anymore. Replace AutoCAD with Pro/E, then you have reason for concern.
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AutoCAD is most certainly still widely used by architects and engineers.
 
I imagine they are already working on 3D modeling files as well. If these files were encrypted, then I imagine this might not be an issue. Unless of course the chinese have reversed the source code for that encryption.
 
hegulator said:
Good thing nobody important uses AutoCAD anymore. Replace AutoCAD with Pro/E, then you have reason for concern.
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Most of the oil and gas industry uses Autocad, only one vendor in one of our projects has ever had anything other than Autocad and it was Inventor.

Product lock in, most companies have old drawings in Autocad, we have stuff going back to the 80's that gets referenced on a regular basis because refineries do not change that much decade to decade.


I worked in the Civil field before I finished college and just about every civil company I had to work with used Autocad LandDesktop or Civil3D, my company used Civil3D which is basically just autocad with a UI layer and some background DB stuff to handle huge point mesh for topo and such.
 
Autocad is certainly still in use, I am installing version 2007 in the background as I'm posting this.
 
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