More on the Chinese Hacking Attack

Here is the latest news on the hack attack against defense contractors and govt officials.

UPI via COMTEX reports that "U.S. anti-terror experts said they were investigating claims Chinese hackers cracked hundreds of senior U.S. and South Korean officials' Gmail accounts. The Department of Homeland Security, charged with protecting U.S. territory from terrorist attacks, FBI and White House National Security Council computer security experts joined Gmail owner Google Inc. in investigating the offensive, whose targets also included military personnel, Chinese political activists, officials of other Asian countries and journalists ..."

I also saw that a US Cabinet member may have been hacked but there is no comment on that one.

We will continue to monitor this story for you but what I found both surprising, ridiculous and not credible was the comment by an NSC person,"We have no reason to believe that any official U.S. government e-mail accounts were accessed." So that basically means that if Sec of State Hillary Clinton's G-mail account was hacked that does not count? (PS Did you also read my blog about the government now switching from Blackberry to iPhones and iPads and Google G-mail for official government e mail service?! Bad timing!)

The news is also that, "The Pentagon intends to deem cyberattacks "acts of war," giving Washington a peremptory right to retaliate against hackers with conventional military strikes, unclassified portions of a U.S. Defense Department report expected to become public next month indicated."

So as we predicted the era of cyberwarfare has indeed arrived and we are hearing the opening shots.

Over a year ago there were other attacks like this that seemed to come from the Lanxiang Vocational School which was founded with funding from the Chinese military.

Military contractors hacked include Northrop Grumman Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. L-3 Communications which supplies command and control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems and products to the US military. This is serious business since it could compromise US defense and national security in a serious way.

I assume that we will not hear a lot more about this as secrecy is critical in fixing the damage done and in altering the security routines (especially those worthless "security "tokens" that have been used for highly sensitive communication and which now appear to also be damaged goods - see previous blogs on that issue.

Steffen Schmidt