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Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks [nytimes.com]
A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.
They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.
U.S. pinpoints code writer behind Google attack [reuters.com]
The man, a security consultant in his 30s, posted sections of the program to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was "working on," the paper said, quoting an unidentified researcher working for the U.S. government.
The spyware creator works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had "special access" to his programing, the report said.
Researchers Call Google Hackers 'Amateurs' [forbes.com]
When Google declared in January that it had been the subject of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" on its network, cybersecurity researchers were quick to connect the incident to a wave of stealthy and innovative cyberspies striking companies around the world. But follow Google's hackers down their rabbit hole, as one group of cybersecurity researchers says it has done, and a portrait of those digital intruders emerges that conflicts with their "superhacker" image.
According to a report that researchers at the cybersecurity firm Damballa plan to release Tuesday, the China-based "Aurora" hackers who targeted Google ( GOOG - news - people ) were both more varied in their tactics and far less advanced than early analyses depicted. The Atlanta-based firm links the attacks to a group of "botnets"--collections of computers compromised with hidden software--that used techniques it described as "old school" and "amateur."
