”Some people are making wild accusations against China and wantonly saying the Chinese military attacked the British government’s computer network,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. ”However, according to my knowledge, China’s police have not received any requests from relevant countries for a joint investigation.”
President Bush may confront China over suspicions that its military hacked US defense computer systems. Since news broke this week that Chinese hackers, allegedly part of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), had hacked into US, British, and German government computers to access defense and foreign-policy-related information, analysts have begun to speculate that the West may be moving into something of a new age cold war stand-off with China.
Some people after graduating from a certain college come back and do something for it, others just forget they’ve ever been there. But that’s not the case of Luis Castillo, Alum of the Texas A&M University. After finishing college, he decided that a nice thing to do is hack into the school’s computer system. After he made his way into the system, he gained illegal access to data about 88.000 current and former students, faculty and staff members, as the Las Vegas Sun informs.
He had graduated with a computer science degree â why doesn’t that surprise me? I’ve noticed that a lot of people that are frustrated through college tend to do something bad against their ex-college or against the ex-school. I don’t know if this guy was an avenging nerd or something like that, but apparently he had no financial reason to do this, since he didn’t access any bank account numbers, nor has he meddled with the schools remunerating system. I lot of hackers do things just because they can. Their actions sometimes boggle my mind.
Businesses are failing to secure their Wi-Fi and VoIP networks adequately, leaving themselves open to growing security threats. IT body the National Computing Centre (NCC) is warning that, although organisations are addressing IT security generally, through virus protection, spam blocking and firewalls, newer technologies are being neglected. The NCC research found 40 percent of respondents either haven’t secured their wireless network at all or have done so only partially. Just 15 percent have VoIP security in place.
Chinese computer hackers are infiltrating British government networks, giving them access to secret information, according to media reports on Thursday. The reports in The Times and The Independent newspapers come a day after US President George W. Bush said he may bring up the issue of suspected Chinese cyber-attacks on the US defence department in a meeting with China’s President Hu Jintao.
Microsoft announced yesterday that it will release five security bulletins – one for a flaw deemed “critical” – next week as part of its September Patch Tuesday distribution.The critical flaw exists in Windows and can be exploited for remote code execution, according to Microsoft’s advance notification. Four âimportantâ patches will also be released. Two of the bulletins fix bugs allowing remote code execution in Visual Studio and MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.
The People’s Liberation Army strategists have made little secret of their desire to establish cyber warfare units capable of mounting just such sorts of mission as the hacking of international government targets. From a satellite-killing missile test in January to reports of spyware in German government computers last month, there are growing concerns that China is being increasingly sophisticated and ambitious in its use of technology to secure information and disrupt communications.
Claims of hackers also infecting German government computers. BEIJING – China on Tuesday rejected a report that hackers controlled by its military had successfully entered a Pentagon network, calling the claim a product of “Cold War” thinking. The Financial Times, citing former and serving U.S. officials, said Chinese People’s Liberation Army hackers broke into a U.S. Defense Department network in June, taking data and prompting the shutdown of a system serving department secretary Robert Gates.
John J. Tkacik Jr., a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has a “sneaking suspicion” that the CIA is being pressured to downplay the “China threat.” Otherwise, why would the intelligence agency have hastily revised, downward, its estimates of the percentage of Chinese GDP dedicated to defense spending? Clearly, the Bush administration is going even softer on China. But if so, someone’s sending mixed messages. Because a slew of unnamed U.S. officials are quoted in Tuesday’s Financial Times expressing alarm about an “incursion” by People’s Liberation Army “hackers” into Pentagon computer systems — “the most successful cyber attack on the U.S. Defense department,” according to the officials.
San Francisco (IDGNS) – The web site of Bank of India, one of India’s leading banks, was restored early Tuesday. The bank had closed the site on Friday after it found that the site had been hacked, and was dispensing malicious code. Sunbelt Software Inc., a provider of security software in Clearwater, Florida, had on Thursday alerted users on its blog that the bank’s site had been compromised, and advised them not to visit the site.