How a Chinese Hacker Tried To Blackmail Me

An anonymous reader writes "Slate provides the first-person account of a CEO who received an e-mail with several business documents attached threatening to distribute them to competitors and business partners unless the CEO paid $150,000. 'Experts I consulted told me that the hacking probably came from government monitors who wanted extra cash,' writes the CEO, who successfully ended the extortion with an e-mail from the law firm from the bank of his financial partner, refusing payment and adding that the authorities had been notified. According to the article, IT providers routinely receive phone calls from their service providers if they detect any downtime on the monitors of network traffic installed by the Chinese government, similar to the alerts provided to telecom providers about VoIP fraud on their IP-PBX switches. 'Hundreds of millions of Chinese operate on the Internet without any real sense of privacy, fully aware that a massive eavesdropping apparatus tracks their every communication and move...' writes the CEO. 'With China's world and ours intersecting online, I expect we'll eventually wonder how we could have been so naive to have assumed that privacy was normal- or that breaches of it were news.'"

Re:Words mean things

[Anonymous Coward]

The hacker vs. cracker war was lost a decade ago. Let it go. It is too ingrained now. The best you can do now is talk about the color of their hats.

Re:Why not use encryption?

[EmperorArthur]

Yes,

If part of your business is in china, and the government demands the ability to intercept its communications.

Like the summary said, this was likely an official monitor looking to make some quick cash on the side. These are the people who legally have access to your most sensitive corporate secrets because the government says so.

Re:block china

[Qzukk]

knew how to "block all of the Chinese IP ranges"

Okean.com has the goods [okean.com].

Monitoring devices

[weegiekev]

Please take this article with a pinch of salt. I was working in Shanghai in 2008 and spent a few years out there. We had a server room, leased lines, an ICP license. Yes, the internet there was filtered and monitored, but that was all done at the ISP level or beyond. I've never heard of any situation where the government installed a monitoring device attached to a server. I really doubt that's what happened, and it sounds like the person quoted in the article doesn't work in IT. Most likely they had a managed leased line and the telecoms provider was being proactive about the service. That's not uncommon.

I heard a lot of speculation and fears from colleagues who came over. I had our HR manager tell me how she knew her blackberry was getting monitored because she could hear it getting tapped. Seriously, your mobile doesn't get routed through an analogue exchange with a tape recorder attached. There's a lot of misunderstanding and mistruths that get spread around. That's not to say censorship doesn't happen. A number of people I know had blog posts removed because of sensitive keywords - that actually seemed to be regarded as pretty normal, and they weren't worried about being dragged away for a 'cup of tea' with the authorities. The reality is generally a lot more normal that you'd imagine though.

In terms of what happened to the CEO's mail account, I think it's much more likely that their machine was compromised with malware. Malware is rife in China, mostly as there's still a huge amount of software piracy. I've seen plenty of download sites in China with files riddled with trojans. Given that their personal email was also broken into, it does sound like their machine was compromised rather than line monitoring. The device attached to the server? I don't buy it...