02 Jun 11. China said on June 1 it was “unacceptable” to blame it for a cyberspying campaign, which Google said had targeted the Gmail accounts of senior U.S. officials, journalists and Chinese activists. The comments marked the latest salvo in a battle between the Chinese government and Google dating back to last year when the U.S. Internet giant revealed it had been the victim of a separate China-based cyberattack.
“To put all of the blame on China is unacceptable,” foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters.
“The so-called statement that the Chinese government supports hacking attacks is a total fabrication… It has ulterior motives.”
Google said June 1 it was hit by a cyberspying campaign that appeared to have originated in Jinan, capital of the eastern Chinese province of Shandong. The company did not specifically point the finger of blame at Chinese authorities.
“We recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing,” Google security team engineering director Eric Grosse said in a blog post.
“The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings,” he said. Those affected included senior US government officials, Chinese political activists, military personnel, journalists and officials in several Asian countries, mainly South Korea, Grosse said. (Source: FT.com)

02 Jun 11. Suspicion that some individual or entity in China was behind a recent cyber attack on Lockheed Martin is growing among experts and agencies looking into the incident.
“It’s unclear at this point precisely who conducted the attacks, but given past history with these sorts of things, there’s a strong tendency to look east. The Far East, in fact, and a country that not so long ago hosted the Olympics,” said one U.S. official who asked for anonymity, but was reluctant to point the finger at China by name. Official and private U.S. cyber-security told Reuters that forensic tracing of attacks like the one that caused Lockheed temporarily to instruct employees to curb remote access to company networks was notoriously difficult, and that clever hackers usually lay elaborate false trails to cover their tracks.
But a U.S. official familiar with progress on the investigation said there was increasing suspicion the Lockheed hack originated with “someone in China.” Likewise, Google said on Wednesday that it had reason to believe that a hacker attack targeting some of its Gmail account holders appeared to originate in China. The Chinese government rejected Google’s allegations, saying that accusations that China fomented hacking “have ulterior motives” and that it was “unacceptable” for the company to blame Beijing. On Thursday, Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said he had nothing to add on the issue beyond “authoritative” denial issued earlier in the day by the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. Lockheed said in a press statement that on May 21, the company detected what it described as a “significant and tenacious attack” on its networks. The company said it detected the attack “almost immediately,” took “aggressive actions” to protect its systems and succeeded in insuring that no data of any kind was compromised. People familiar with the Lockheed hacking attempt said that hackers managed to get into the defense contractor’s networks using data stolen in March by hackers which could be used to reduce the effectiveness of SecureID tokens produced by EMC Corp. The tokens are widely used by companies to give their employees secure remote access to computer networks. (Source: Reuters)

01 Jun 11. Making online friends could play into the hands of the “enemy”, according to China’s People’s Liberation Army, which has said its roughly 2.3 m soldiers will be banned from using social media.
The world’s largest military force has notified service men and