Interesting deal between Google and China. Although the real winner here will be China’s search engine called Baidu. You can bet that any telecom stuff that Google was planning on doing in China, will probably suffer as well.
The real story though, is the whole concept of a mega corporation like Google, taking on a super power like China? Thomas Ricks was pretty intrigued by the concept as well. Time to break out the pre-Westphalia rule book, and start implementing cyber privateer hacking to go after these state sponsored hackers. –Matt
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Security specialist ‘has evidence of Chinese attack on Google’
A US computer expert says he has found the ‘digital fingerprints’ of Chinese authors on the tools used to launch recent attacks against Google
By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor20 Jan 2010
Joe Stewart, a security specialist with SecureWorks in the US, told the New York Times that he had analysed the software used to attack Google, and found that the main program used by the hackers contained a module based on an algorithm that appeared in a Chinese technical document that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites.
Google last week announced that the accounts of human rights activists and political dissidents had been hacked, and that it believed the attacks had originated from China. However, details about the precise nature of the attacks were not revealed, although security experts broadly agreed that Google was probably correct in its suspicions.
It is thought that a Trojan virus, known as Hydraq, was responsible for opening a “back door” in to compromised computers, which could then be used by hackers to access and take control of a machine without the owner’s permission or knowledge.
Stewart uses a method known as a “reverse engineering” to unravel malicious software, viruses and Trojans to identify how and where they originated. He looks for patterns in the code, and for unusual algorithms used by hackers to error-check transmitted data.
However, Stewart said that he could not rule out the possibility that the programmers behind the Google hack had laid a false trail that pointed to Chinese involvement in order to disguise the fact they originated from another country or government.
“But Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is probably the best one,” he told the New York Times.
Story here.
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Hackers create opportunity for military firms
Attacks on Google boost the market for cyber-security just as government weapons spending is expected to slow. Military firms are retooling for rising demand by corporations as well as government.
By W.J. Hennigan
January 19, 2010
For U.S. military firms, the latest revelations of highly sophisticated hacker attacks on Google Inc. are highlighting a new reality, and a potentially lucrative business: The battlefield is shifting to cyberspace.
