Not sure if you’re up to date on the latest Google vs China developments. But it sure is exciting. Well, especially if you’re concerned about human rights, freedom of speech, The Communist Regime, censorship, internet freedom, IT, search results, security, privacy, Fortune 500 companies, corporate communications, and all other equally boring issues. Hell, this news trumps the Nexus One announcement like nothing.
The gist:
Unusally highly sophisticated hack attacks originating from China compromises some data from Google, particularly targeted at obtaining email records of human rights activists and attempting to steal company source code. In addition, numerous other high profile companies were similarly targeted.
The result of which Google has decided to stop censoring search results on Google.cn, its chinese search page, which was a requirement for it to operate in China. Therefore Google might pull out of the chinese search market if a resolution cannot be found.
The news, has grown and grown and grown, such that now it involves a helluva lot of people, companies and issues.
Here’s what you can do!:
1) Update your operating system, antivirus and browser to the latest version.
2) Do not click on email links unintelligently.
What the hackers did:
1) Sent emails to employees with infected links or attachments (an unresolved Adobe PDF loophole was exploited)
2) Once opened or clicked on, malware is installed on the pc as some windows DLL file
3) The malware communicates to a server which is prepped to receive data.
The issue has gone up to Hillary Clinton, who is no doubt going to talk to China about it.
I am pretty surprised that the hackers did not manage to access the email contents of the targeted users, considering how unsecure the web can be. hmm. I guess hacking a geek company isn’t going to be easy. Google’s security team managed to hack back into one of the malware controlling servers and so discovered that 20-30 other companies were hit.
Google.cn’s 700 employees have been getting flowers at the office. Baidu, the largest search site in china, has seen its share price go up. Incidentally Baidu was hacked by some group recently and a banner was put on its site, apparently the same ones who hacked Twitter.
and this stuff happened like right before xmas. hm.
