Another Attack, On Law Firm Suing China 131
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the attack on Google, another company claims to be the victim of a similar attack. Gipson Hoffman & Pancione is a Los Angeles law firm whose client, CYBERsitter, is suing the government of China and several Chinese companies for using their intellectual property in the infamous Green Dam censorship filter. According to the firm, they have been targeted by a spear phishing attack from China." Relatedly, smartaleckkill writes with news that the US state department is to formally protest to China over the alleged cyber-attacks on Google, "likely early next week."
As far as lawsuits go (Score:0, Interesting)
um... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Technobabble has gone too far (Score:4, Interesting)
It gets worse. According to the linked Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
"Several recent phishing attacks have been directed specifically at senior executives and other high profile targets within businesses, and the term whaling has been coined for these kinds of attacks."
Presumably said senior executives tend to be fat and blubbery.
Re:um... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably these guys. [wikipedia.org]
Kind of a weird phenomenon. Makes me wonder if youthful rebellion manifests itself in a society like that.
Can Airbus Sue the US now? (Score:2, Interesting)
Can Airbus Sue the US now? After all, if hacking into communications is now a lawsuit offence that can be persued against a government, the US interception of Airbus negotiations to land a sale so that this could be leaked to Boeing and then let Boeing win the contract should likewise be open to lawsuit.
Will the US agree?
Or is it only bad when China does it?
Re:Just wait until the Chinese take over ECHELON (Score:2, Interesting)
Lots of countries run mini Echelon like systems.
"The message, a fax sent by satellite transmission from Egypt's foreign ministry to its embassy in London, was intercepted on November 15 by Swiss intelligence, the newspaper reported. The Swiss defence ministry said it was investigating the leak of the document."
fromhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/10/usa.mainsection
China has in inward looking system, built by US/EU corps and telcos.
What would an Echelon show? A huge worldwide capture system, beaming down to a few US bases for sorting.
The resulting stream of wanted info is encrypted and sent back to the US after heavy sorting.
The NSA sucks in all, the swallow is the hidden art.
Best to look for UFO's via MS and perl on 56k modems.
That seems to have been more creative than any sat/golfball trace.
Re:Tread softly (Score:2, Interesting)
Google is the sealed train.
What the CIA funds and sells to the world, they can also use to inject NGO's, cults, porn, MS based services, democracy, encryption and other harmful ideas.
As for "origin of their traffic" who knows what they where fishing for. America is smart at tracing the net, You can send your ip's and data stash around the web a few times.
Unless you pick it up in some huge pipe equiped EU/US low security walk in office next day with a drive and clip board, someone will keep on tracking.
Someone wanted something bad or wanted the access to google backend in a more 24/7 way, like some of the US telcos and their outsourced billing systems 'gift' to distant parts of the world.
Someone was not smart and slipped up.
Google is not MS with best effort, shared time visa cents in the $ opps we did not backup adims, someone trained the google staff well.
My feel is MS and yahoo rolled over long ago.
Google had something neat going on, someone wanted a back door and learned not to mess with a NSA/CIA funded US telco front.
THe real problem is what China is doing .... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think there was anything unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
"There are attacks every day. I don't think there was anything unusual," Mr Ballmer added.
Seriously, Ballmer? Have you read the part where the Chinese government has been labelled as the attacker of over 30 international companies by Verisign? Not just some guy in China, but the Chinese government. I would consider that pretty damn unusual.
Re:Not a serious security problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sigh. This again (Score:4, Interesting)
It's worth pointing out specifically that our debt wih China is one of the largest weapons in our peace arsenal. If China takes a warlike action (ie invades Taiwan) one of the first things we would do is cancel our debt obligations.
It is at least partially due to this fear that China has not yet declared open hostilities. When they start selling that debt, or stop taking on new debt, watch out.
I do not think that the current issue with Google rises to the level that we could do that and preserve our credibility. But it does start painting a picture, and combined with the jailing of those steel execs last summer its not going in a positive direction.
I'd love to know the other 20 companies that were hacked at the same time as Google. We'd have a clearer knowledge of China's intentions and the threat she poses. But you can believe that the State Department knows.
When does China come up for the MFN vote again? Expect to hear this then again, and maybe more details too.