ASUS announced yesterday that it was the victim of a highly sophisticated APT attack, trying to justify its hack of the ASUS Live app Update. But as everything shows, the company doesn't seem to care that much about consumer safety.
The company's announcement yesterday said:
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks are attacks at a national level and usually start from a few countries targeting certain international organizations or institutions rather than consumers.
ASUS Live Update is a proprietary tool that comes with ASUS laptops to ensure that the system always has the most recently drivers and firmware from ASUS.
So a small number of devices have been found with malicious code through a sophisticated attack on Live Update servers in an effort to target a very small and specific group of users. ASUS Customer Service comes in contact with affected users and provides help in removing security risks.
Essentially what the company wants to tell us is that sophisticated APT attacks are not targeted at all consumers but in some targeted by government groups. However, ASUS Live Update is targeted and used by all consumers, and even if it publishes the company at this time, it does not change the fact that its systems have endangered millions of customers.
But let's see what the company has to say:
According to TechCrunch, the company has been warned about the loose safety of security researcher Zack Whittaker:
The security researcher warned Asus two months ago that its employees were publishing codes accesss on GitHub that could be used to access the corporate network the company's.
A password, found in a workers' repo, allowed the researcher to access an email account that internal developers and engineers use to share apps, drivers, and tools.
This particular security breach was not directly responsible for the latest violation of ASUS Live Update, but it shows an incredible indifference to very simple security procedures.
