Internet giant Google has said it may end its operations in China following a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating from the country. It did not accuse Beijing directly, but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine - google.cn.
It did not accuse Beijing directly, but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine - google.cn.
Chinese rival Baidu called the move "hypocritical" and financially driven. In US trade on Wednesday Baidu's shares were up 10%, and Google's down 1.5%. Google said the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the primary target of the attack, which occurred in December.
Google said the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the primary target of the attack, which occurred in December.
Google, by implying that Beijing had sponsored the attack has placed itself in the center of an international controversy, exposing what appears to be a state-sponsored corporate espionage campaign that compromised more than 30 technology, financial and media companies, most of them global Fortune 500 enterprises....
Ironically, "bulletproof hosting" in China is a well-established, commercial model. Also The reporting isn't clear to me whether or not the corporate "systems" were GOOG-hosted rather than independently owned and operated networks.
[Hackers] apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. Read more...
Read more...
in other news,
Baidu.com was unavailable part of Monday [12 Jan], but early in the outage the site displayed a message that read: "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army," according to a report on the People's Daily, the Web site of the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper. The group was the same that had taken responsibility for an attack against Twitter.com last month that redirected the micro-blogging service's traffic to a domain that hosted the same message. Read more...
The group was the same that had taken responsibility for an attack against Twitter.com last month that redirected the micro-blogging service's traffic to a domain that hosted the same message.
