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Google Reveals Chinese Espionage Efforts January 13, 2010

Social Engineering techniques helped attackers orchestrate an attack on Google’s infrastructure from Chinese hackers working inside China.

The middle of December 2009, Google’s infrastructure was attacked by a highly sophisticated operation originating from China. The attack resulted in theft of intellectual property from Google. Along with Google, there were 20 other large Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical companies also attacked.

Google says the attackers tried to get into Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists around the world based on subject lines for the emails.

The hackers targeted users within a targeted network system with carefully crafted emails full of personal information. The whole goal with the emails was to get the user to open the email PDF or Work document attachment full of malware. Once the malware laden document is opened, the malware compromises the computer and the attacker can command the computer remotely. This is just the beginning, once a computer is compromised on a network the attackers branch out from there probing other computers raiding emails accounts to get more personal information ammunition for more social engineering attacks on the network.

It is well known China suppresses/censors their citizen from access to many Internet sites and for the past year further limiting free speech on the Web. Why is this whole ordeal such a big deal anyways? Google wants to run their standard version of its search engine in China and have not been able to. I ask, “What if these attackers were orchestrated by Google to give them leverage with the Chinese Government so Google could run their standard version search engine more easily? Or could the Chinese Government be trying to steal intellectual rights from Google to create something of their own and kick Google out of China?

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