Threat trackers call cyber-espionage groups as lame

According to threat-trackers, Cyber-espionage groups are too numerous to count and are often far less skilled than their reputation suggests.

The director of global research at Kaspersky Lab, Costin Raiu, estimates that between one hundred to two hundred hacking crews are in China alone.

During a panel session at the RSA Europe Conference, Raiu said that despite the hype abut zero-day attacks, many successful assaults relied on rudimentary attacks that successfully took advantage of poor patching practices and other rudimentary security mistakes.

"Lots of attacks are successful but not advanced," Raiu said. "They start with the most common stuff before they go up the ladder."

"They don't want to use zero-days, exposing them in the process, unless they need to," he added.

The vast majority of the attacks are phishing attacks that ask the user to hand over confidential information. Such as handing over their passwords to a fake site.

Reviewing the attacks, many of the attacks involved Win XP machines, with no anti-virus installed, weak patching and systems where everyone is operating with admin privileges.