Butterfly: the cyber gang that stings like a bee, stealing corporate secrets

A group of cyber criminals is attacking multi-billion dollar companies across Europe, the US and Canada in order to gain confidential information and intellectual property, IT security firm Symantec has warned.

The corporate espionage group, which is not-state sponsored but financially motivated, has compromised a string of major corporations over the past three years including those operating in the pharmaceutical, commodities, IT software and internet sectors – such as Twitter and Facebook.

Symantec is calling the attack group 'Butterfly'. However, there's nothing delicate about its impact. The group operates at a much higher level than the average cybercrime gang, bypassing credit card details or customer databases in favour of high-level corporate information.

Its motivations are to sell the information to the highest bidder, or the gang may be operating as hackers for hire, Symantec speculates. Or the stolen information may be used for insider trading purposes.

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