[ISN] Activists' E-Mails Hacked in China

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:01:03 -0600 (CST)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/world/asia/31china.html

By Andrew Jacobs
The New York Times
March 30, 2010

BEIJING -- In what appears to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail 
accounts of at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists 
who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese 
human rights organization also said that hackers disabled its Web site 
for a fifth straight day.

The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be 
aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their 
accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case 
of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all 
correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address.

The attacks, most of which began last Thursday, occurred the same week 
that Google angered the Chinese government by routing Internet search 
engine requests out of the mainland to a site in Hong Kong. Google said 
the move was prompted by its objections to censorship rules and by a 
spate of attacks on Google e-mail users that the company suggested had 
originated in China.

Those cyberattacks, which began as early as last April, affected dozens 
of American corporations, law firms and individuals, many of them rights 
advocates critical of China's authoritarian government.

The victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in 
the United States, an analyst who writes about China's security 
apparatus and several print journalists based in Beijing and Taipei, the 
capital of Taiwan.

[...]


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Received on Tue Mar 30 2010 - 23:01:03 PDT

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