Gaming: Google Says It's Disrupted A Super-serious 'global Espionage...

It's not the sexiest spy story I've ever heard, I'll be honest.

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Google Sheets is perhaps my most disliked member of the Google Workplace suite. It's not that it's bad at what it does, more that it's a deathly-dull spreadsheet editor that I loathe having to stare at for more than five minutes.

But lo and indeed behold, because Google says it's caught Sheets being used in a super-exciting act of global espionage! Okay, exciting was the wrong word. Concerning, that's what I was going for.

According to Google's most recent Threat Intelligence blog post, last week the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), alongside its partners, "took action to disrupt a global espionage campaign targeting telecommunications and government organisations in dozens of nations across four continents."

The threat actor, mysteriously named "UNC2814" and said by Google to be suspected of connection to the People's Republic of China, was said to be using API calls to communicate with SaaS apps and "disguise their malicious traffic as benign."

And would you believe it, the primary SaaS app in question was none other than our old friend, Google Sheets. At this point, I'd like you to imagine me ripping a Scooby Doo-style mask off a spreadsheet.

The mechanism by which our alleged spies operated is referred to by Google as Gridtide, and is described as a "sophisticated C-based backdoor with the ability to execute arbitrary shell commands", as well as uploading and downloading files.

Gridtide is said to have been leveraging Google Sheets as "a high-availability C2 platform, treating [a] spreadsheet not as a document, but as a communication channel to facilitate the transfer of raw data and shell commands."

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Source: PC Gamer