Google is evaluating a "new approach to China" after the Internet giant suffered "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack...originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google."  The Google announcement, written by Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, notes that the attack was not just on Google, but also targeted "at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors."

This industry targeting is not new to ScanSafe. In late 2008, ScanSafe released a report that discussed our analysis of Web malware encounters among 21 industry verticals, including evidence of specific targeting of highly sensitive verticals. The ScanSafe Vertical Risk Assessment discusses those risks in detail.

Further, we've warned for some time that even mass-distributed malware becomes targeted once that malware gets into the corporate network - its actions will change depending on who the company is or to which industry they belong. As we blogged in Password Stealers: Few Names, Many Flavors, "most of the password stealers that are actively circulating via the Web allow for custom configuration. Once on the system, the password stealer typically opens a port to listen for remote commands and then downloads a custom configuration file that specifies the information to be harvested. Obviously this can allow for a high degree of focused targeting."

Unfortunately, much of this potential likely gets overlooked thanks to innocuous sounding malware detection names such as PWS.Lineage or WoWStealer which unfortunately imply the only targets are online gaming credentials. Nothing could be further from the truth.