Chinese Hackers/Pirates Nearly Bring Down US Tech Firm

Nov 282012
 
Chinese Hackers with suspected links to the government nearly ruinedt a California software company tin an orchestrated attack that mirrors others against companies, government departments and political parties.
The company, Solid Oak, managed to get a confidential legal settlement that has stabilized its financial position and stopped the harassment but it is a case study in how pervasive, ruthless and damaging internet crime can be.
Bloomburg  provided this comprehensive report of the case and the mafia like tactics employed to gain a commercial advantage.

During his civil lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China, Brian Milburn says he never once saw one of the country’s lawyers. He read no court documents from China’s attorneys because they filed none. The voluminous case record at the US District courthouse in Santa Ana, California, contains a single communication from China: a curt letter to the US State Department, urging that the suit be dismissed.

That doesn’t mean Milburn’s adversary had no contact with him.

For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software, Milburn’s family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company’s parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a US$2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April.

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New Research On Computer Backdoors Reveals Disturbing Long Term Risks For All Netizens

Nov 052012
 

Research by the University of Toronto Citizen Lab shows that computer back doors are a permanent security risk to users through out the world.

Their research based on events in the middle east demonstrates readily available commercial software is being used by governments to infiltrate computers used by critics and dissidents.

Bloomberg news reported the case of Ahmed Mansoor who was sitting in “his study in Dubai and made the mistake of clicking on a Microsoft Word attachment that arrived in an e-mail, labeled “very important” in Arabic, from a sender he thought he recognized.

“With that click, the pro-democracy activist unwittingly downloaded spyware that seized on a flaw in the Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) program to take over his computer and record every keystroke. The hackers infiltrated his digital life so deeply they still accessed his personal e-mail even after he changed his password.

Since then, Mansoor, 42, an electrical engineer and father of four, says he has suffered two beatings by thugs in September during his campaign for citizens’ civil rights in the Persian Gulf federation of the United Arab Emirates. While those assailants remain unknown, researchers say they’ve figured out what was behind the virtual assault.

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