Software
The hacking that angered Google Inc. and hit dozens of other businesses adds to growing concern that China is a center for a global explosion of Internet crimes, part of a rash of attacks aimed at a wide array of targets, from a British military contractor to banks and chemical companies to a California software maker.
The government denies it is involved, and it reiterated that on Wednesday. Speaking in Paris, Chinas foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said China itself “is the victim of pirate attacks” and the international community must fight the phenomenon together.
But experts say the highly skilled attacks suggest the Chinese military, which is a leader in cyberwarfare research, or other government agencies might be breaking into computers to steal technology and trade secrets to help state companies.
“Chinese hacking activity is significant in quantity and quality,” said Sami Saydjari, president of the consulting firm Cyber Defense Agency and a former U.S. National Security Agency official.
Officials in the United States, Germany and Britain say hackers linked to Chinas military have broken into government and defense systems. But attacks on commercial systems receive less attention because victims rarely come forward, possibly for fear it might erode trust in their businesses.
Google was the exception when it announced Jan. 12 that attacks hit it and at least 20 other companies. Google says it has “conclusive evidence” the attacks came from China but declined to say whether the government was involved.
Google cited the attacks and attempts to snoop on dissidents in announcing that it would stop censoring results on its China-based search engine and leave the country if the government does not loosen restrictions.
Only two other companies have disclosed they were targets in that attack - software maker Adobe Systems Inc. and Rackspace Inc., a Web hosting service.
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish security software maker F-Secure Corp., said his company has detected about two dozen attacks originating from China each month since 2005.
“There must be much more that go completely undetected,” he said.
Hypponen said a large British military contractor with which his company worked discovered last year that information had leaked for 18 months from one of its computers to an Internet address in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong. He said similar attacks on military contractors were found in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland.
Saydjari said other researchers have told him of dozens of U.S. companies that have been attacked from China but said he could not disclose their names or other details.
“China has a strategic goal of becoming the world-dominant economic power within this century. Certainly one way to do that faster is to steal industrial secrets,” he said.
There are no estimates of losses attributable to hacking traced to China, but antivirus supplier McAfee Inc. says intellectual property worth an estimated $1 trillion was stolen worldwide through the Internet in 2008.
Separately, a Los Angeles law firm says it was hit Jan. 11 by an attack that appeared to originate in China after it filed a lawsuit for CyberSitter LLC, a software maker that accuses the Chinese government of stealing its code for use in a Web-filtering system.
The firm Gipson Hoffman & Pancione said e-mails sent to its lawyers contained malicious software designed to extract information from their computers.
Security firm Mandiant Corp. has dubbed such attacks - which allow repeated thefts over months or years - an “advanced persistent threat” and says each one it has studied over the past five years involved theft of information related to U.S.-China corporate acquisitions, negotiations or military acquisitions.