The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has issued a statement that its servers were infiltrated in January this year leading to a data breach. And preliminary inquiry made by its security experts has revealed that the hackers accessed the servers through a Zoho Vulnerability- once used by Chinese hacking groups to launch cyber attacks.
ICRC released the statement in mid-February to maintain transparency with its stakeholders and consumers and added that the exploit bug in the password management system of Zoho ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus has been fixed.
Cybersecurity Analysts state the exploit was used by cyber criminals to take control of the servers by compromising admin privileges to exfiltrate data from Active Directory Files and registry hives.
As the attack was conducted through highly sophisticated hacking tools, ICRC suspects the hand of Chinese intelligence in the incident.
Note 1- ICRC is a Geneva based organization that works to protect victims from national and international conflicts (such as war) on humanitarian grounds. And it is one of the older and well honored organizations in the entire world, having won 3 Noble Peace Prizes.
Note 2- Zoho offers online office software to businesses around the world and this includes Word Processing, Spreadsheets, CRM, Presentations, Notes, databases, and web conferencing.
Note 3- In November 2021, tech giant Microsoft issued a public alert that state funded threat actors can steal sensitive information from databases including names, locations, contact details and data related to R&D.
