Anatomy of a Targeted Attack with Global consequences

Targeted attacks are designed to disrupt, spy or otherwise harm a specific industry, organization or even person. Their impact is far-reaching, causing 10 to 50 time greater damage than a successful mass-attack, according to Gartner. What happens when an undisclosed vulnerability is used by an organized entity as part of a wide cyber-espionage campaign?
This presentation will provide an insight into the recent attack that hit Google, Adobe and dozens of other blue-chip companies in order to extract intellectual property and political sensitive information. I will discuss technical aspects of the zero-day vulnerability used by the attackers (CVE-2010-0249) as well as the malicious code deployed in order to take control of the targeted systems. Besides its sophistication, this attack was notable due to its costs, both economical and political in nature. I will present statistics regarding the global spread of the exploit code and its payload, statistics gathered in the Microsoft Malware Protection Center.