aurora

The vast majority of consumer anti-virus products are still failing to block the Operation Aurora exploits used in the high profile attack against Google and other blue-chip firms last December, according to independent tests.

NSS Labs evaluated the effectiveness of seven popular consumer endpoint security products to see which blocked variants of the Operation Aurora attack. The security testing firm reckoned that most, if not all, of the products would block the exploit and malicious code payloads associated with an ultra-high profile attack that has been a mainstay of talk in the information security biz for the last six weeks.

Intel was targeted by "sophisticated" attacks last month, about the same time that Google reported its network had been breached, allegedly by Chinese hackers. In its annual report filed Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Intel confirmed that it had been hit in January.

"We regularly face attempts by others to gain unauthorized access through the Internet to our information technology systems by, for example, masquerading as authorized users or surreptitious introduction of software," read the 10-K filing.

U.S. authorities have tracked down the man who wrote the code used in the hacker attack on Google. He's a "freelance security consultant" in China, and his participation makes it even harder for the Chinese government to deny involvement. The man's role was an oblique one: while he wrote the code that took advantage of a security hole in Internet Explorer, he himself didn't do any actual hacking.