It all started on Tuesday night, after Google (GOOG) made its announcement that it was mulling a withdrawal from China, after which the Shanghai market tanked 3.1% [1] . This was due to several hacking attempts made by injecting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe (PDF file attachments) coordinated by Chinese intelligence. The hacks being from Chinese intelligence is yet to be proven. Google claims there is evidence to suggest the primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. According to various news reports, Google and other companies like Adobe were the target of these recent attacks[2]. Although china does deny these claims and have stated they have strict censor policy for foreign Internet firms[4]. There are sure references of the hacks attempts and hacks being made from China by many companies which were severely hit by this attack[2] This is not the first time that China has been involved in these kind of cases. There is a range of history of hacks being made from China and it has a long history of doing so[5].
Can this mean google moving out from China? Google made an official statement on its blog as “In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google[3] “ Whereas there would be no financial and economic planners throughout the world who would not like to keep themselves off from Chinese markets including Google. But Google business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and it does have potentially far-reaching consequences as stated [3] . The new cyber warfare is getting a little tricky for all the major financial, defense contractors and major companies. Prof. Howard A Schmidt, at McAfee Cybercrime advisory very early said : “Cyber warfare is now a part of human conflict that we should get used to seeing more often. If a major cyber conflict between nation-states were to erupt, it is very likely that the private sector would get caught in the crossfire,” So it might be the time for these companies to buckle up their security.
Lets hope that these attacks on Chinese activist on Gmail accounts are not for keeping their rights of speech restricted. There are policies in China about publishing and rights of speech but this statement shouldn’t be governed by hacking into other systems. It is yet to see if US finally take measures against China[7] . Let us wait and see what happens on this front.
To keep us secured and relevant to these recent attacks F-secure has posted youtube video below. [6] The video would provide more information on the current issue.
References
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/was-it-actually-google-that-tanked-the-shanghai-stock-market-2010-1
2. http://www.insurancetech.com/blog/archives/2010/01/after_hack_goog.html
3. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html
4. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-denies-google-hacking-claims-1868599.html
5. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/China-has-a-history-of-hacking-computers/articleshow/5442099.cms
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFw9ZHy0V3c&feature=player_embedded
7. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-14/u-s-may-take-formal-measures-against-china-over-google-hacking.html
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