【10.04.06 加拿大环球邮报】China says it’s not behind global Internet spy ring

青蛙小王子

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/china-says-its-not-behind-global-internet-spy-ring/article1525583/

The Chinese government is denying involvement in a global Internet spy ring that Canadian researchers uncovered this week, saying it will attempt to crack down on suspected hackers within its borders.

A new report details one of the largest online espionage rings ever detected. Investigators in Toronto and Ottawa who uncovered it dubbed the operation the Shadow Network and tracked it to Chongqing and Chengdu, two cities in Southwest China, and involves many servers in that country.

The report, Shadows in the Cloud, is the product of a year-long investigation that found hackers stole hundreds of sensitive files, among them military documents from India, United Nations files, and visa applications involving 16 countries, including Canada, taken from computers at Indian embassies.

“We are firmly opposed to various kinds of hacking activities through the Internet,” Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry told reporters Tuesday.

The report does not blame the Chinese government, although it indicates the stolen files went to at least four servers in China. The investigators, who work at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, in collaboration with Ottawa security firm SecDev, say the spies could be part of China’s “patriotic hacking” movement, individuals who are independent of government, although the information they find often ends up with the state.

Websites from 10 organizations, including the University of Western Ontario in London, New York University, and U.S. aerospace manufacturer Honeywell were mentioned as victims of the Shadow Network.

An official at the UWO said the school is probing its systems for irregularities but has not found a problem. Ruban Chelladurai, associate vice-president of planning, budgeting and information technology at UWO, said the school wants to work with the report’s authors to determine how it showed up in the investigation.

“We have done our scanning internally and at this point in time, if you look at the last few days, there hasn’t been anything that stands out in terms of compromise of computers or servers, or any sort of unusual activity on our networks,” Mr. Chelladurai said.

He said UWO officials were surprised to see computers at the university on a list of those that the network might have used, possibly to reroute stolen files. The spy ring used Internet tools such as Yahoo e-mail accounts, Google Groups and Twitter feeds to tell infected computers to download files to a drop zone that fed servers in China.

“Occasionally, going back the last year or so, we have had people trying to get into our systems and using our computers as intermediary devices and we were able to cut them all off before any kind of compromise took place,” Mr. Chelladurai said.

Ron Deibert, one of the report’s authors, said India took the brunt of the cyber espionage, along with the Dalai Lama’s office in Dharamsala, India.