China (ip-192.com): Two Chinese educational institutions, Lanxiang Vocational School, which has links to the Chinese military, and Shanghai Jiaotong University, may have been involved in a series of cyber-attacks on Google, American enterprises, and government agencies. The attacks (ip-192.com reported here and here) may have begun as early as April 2009, the New York Times reports.
Several companies including Adobe have confirmed that they were targeted in the attacks, and other victims are thought to include Yahoo! and Northrop Grumman. Questions remain about whether the Chinese government was involved in the attacks. China has gone so far as to say that it had nothing to do with the Google problem. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has taken exception to those claims, saying that China's potential actions against Google will have "consequences."
Google has been working with US intelligence agencies to investigate the attacks, which were described as bearing the marks of high-level espionage. American military experts say that using students to camouflage the attacks or actually hack into foreign computer networks would be in keeping with China's pattern of encouraging individual patriotic hackers to "support its policies."
The hackers used some pretty sophisticated methods to crack the security of American corporations: instead of spamming, they used an exploit in Internet Explorer to insinuate themselves into multi-response email conversations, called "man in the mailbox," sending malicious software attachments supposedly coming from someone the recipient knows.
Spokesmen for the two schools told the New York Times that they hadn't heard U.S. investigators had actually implicated them in the attacks.
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