Baku, August 3 (AZERTAC). A security firm has discovered the largest series of cyber attacks to date with a single server hacking more than 70 corporations and government organizations including the United Nations.

McAfee, a leading security firm discovered the intrusions and believes that it originates from one "state actor" although it refused to name it. Experts who have read the analysis said the evidence points to China, according to a Reuters report. The hacking campaign had been discovered by McAfee in March this year when researchers found logs of the attacks while reviewing the contents of a "command and control server" that they had discovered during an investigation into security breaches at defense companies. The earliest breaches date back five years and there could still be intrusions the firm hasn`t detected yet. Dubbed "Operation Shady RAT" the five year campaign attacked government organizations of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the World Anti-Doping agency and private companies. Other targets hit by the attack include the International Olympic Committee, a U.S. Energy Department lab, a dozen U.S. defense firms and the United Nations secretariat.

"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," said Dmitri Alperovith, McAfee`s vice president of threat research in the 14 page report. "What is happening to all this data ... is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team`s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat." Some of the attacks lasted just a month, others lasted years. The United Nations intrusions went unnoticed for nearly two years. Others are still ongoing such as the intrusion into the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal. "Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to unscrupulous competitors," Alperovitch told Reuters.

"This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history," he said. "The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening." Although McAfee didn`t point to a specific cause of the intrusions, other security experts believe the most likely candidate is China. James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center of Strategic and International Studies points that the target list implicates China as the perpetrator. The intruders were after data on sensitive U.S. military systems, as well as material from satellite communications, electronics, natural gas companies and even bid data from a Florida real estate company, McAfee said. Forty-nine of the 72 compromised organizations were in the United States. "Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia," Lewis said.