Chinese schools named in Google hack attacks
p2pnet view Politics| Advertising:- Giant online advertising company Google was able to turn hack attacks on its China business into a major international incident ultimately involving US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the National Security Agency, which it was able to suborn for “technical assistance”.
Google is a corporation which exists to make money – lots of money — for its owners and shareholders.
It’s not an arm of the Obama government, as Clinton once pointed out. But it’d be easy for someone arriving from Mars, say, to make the mistake of thinking the opposite.
Now the attacks “have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military,” the New York Times has “people involved in the investigation” saying.
It goes on >>>
Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.
The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.
Spokesmen for the schools said they hadn’t heard American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses, says the NHT, adding:
“Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
“A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.”
Google has “said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article”, the story adds.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
able to suborn – Google hooks up with US spy agency, February 4, 2010
New York Times – Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks, February 18, 2010
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February 19th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
You are kidding me right? Lanxiang Vocational school takes in highschool dropouts and give them semi-skilled labor training (go look at their course offering – auto repair, CNC operation, computer operation, excavator operation, welding, culinary school, cosmetology, electronics repair).
Does this sound like a place to recruit China’s best and brightest for cyber war? If this is true we have nothing to worry about.