New York Times Hack Puts Antivirus on Defensive

The New York Times disclosed a multi-month compromise believed to originate from China where attackers used spear-phishing and custom information-stealing malware (45 distinct programs) and leveraged compromised U.S. university systems as staging grounds to harvest reporters' and editors' emails and credentials, including access to a domain controller; Symantec detected only one of the malicious programs, highlighting AV evasion and the sophistication of the operation.