In the beginning of February of this year, News Corporation’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch tweeted about the attempts of Chinese hackers to infiltrate the Wall Street Journal. The focus of the attacks seems to be coverage of China by the independent newspaper. Previously it was the New York Times news site that had been hacked. Then came the Washington Post. A little over a week later, it was Facebook’s turn to be attacked by the same hackers.
Although Facebook officials assure us that there were no user accounts accessed, the malware was installed and active. Officials at Twitter, the other social networking site also experienced the theft of more than a quarter of million users passwords by what they describe as professional hackers.
It was a matter of a few days later that Apple announced a breach in their security that allowed the “un-hackable” Apples to in fact be hacked. A weakness in Java plug-ins was to blame for the problem and the attempt was traced back to, you guessed it, China. In fact, Apple Corp. was able to trace the hack attempt back to a specific building in Shanghai, known to be the source of several hacking attempts worldwide. The building belongs to Unit 61398 part of China’s People’s Liberation Army which according to the Mandiant report has stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from over one hundred and forty organizations around the world.
Then just a few days later, it was Microsoft’s turn to be targeted. And, in fact they were hacked and reported that some of their computers had been intentionally infected with malware. Luckily, no customer data was accessed or stolen, but the investigation continues. Each of these companies has faced an unprecedented number of attacks recently and these attacks are all traceable back to China, not surprisingly, the Chinese government denies these accusations.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Leave your comment