A 60-page report, conducted by information security company Mandiant, pinpoints the source of many of the recent hacking attacks from China on U.S. companies, government officials, and journalists as originating from a Chinese military building in Shanghai. According to the report, hundreds of programmers are trying to pry into the computers of the top U.S. companies in a bid to obtain secrets and gather overall intelligence. The report indicates that the hacking isn't just limited to information, and that some of the activities are targeted at municipal systems such as waterworks and power grids.
While the investigators were unable to directly tag hackers inside the building as the culprits, a spokesperson from Mandiant told the New York Times, "either they are coming from inside [that building], or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood." Mandiant even produced a video of one of the Chinese hacker attacks in action to show how the hacks are occurring, which you can view below.
UPDATE: Just as we wrapped up this report, yet another story surfaced just minutes ago from Reuters revealing that Apple's internal computers have been hit by the same hackers that targeted Facebook last week. There's no word on whether or not these attacks on two of the leading U.S. tech companies are directly linked to China, but the connections are implied in the Reuters report. It looks like the new superpower cold war is in full swing— on the Internet.
Via NYTimes
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