On Jan. 19th, 2012, Mark Hosenball reported for Reuters on the alleged Indian hacking of a US-China commission. Reference this earlier blog post for an explanation of the events leading up to this post. According to the article, there is increasing suspicion that Chinese hackers were actually behind the entire episode. Reuters spent considerable time sifting through a series of e-mails from the US-China Commission (again, those e-mails had been posted by a hacktivist group after allegedly being found on Indian government servers). As a result of that analysis, Reuters discovered that "a large proportion of the raw email traffic . . . consists of messages to and from [William Reinsch] at his [National Foreign Trade Council] email address." The article notes that the National Foreign Trade Council is a Washington-based pro-trade group.
What does that all mean? The article makes two conclusions: the Indian government probably wasn't involved, and the entire episode may indicate a larger Chinese spear-phising plot. In this sense, targeting of the NFTC might indicate the first level of a "blended attack" where hackers breach less-secure systems in order to breach more secure systems later.
Still no word on the veracity of the memo, but Apple has denied allegations that it provided the Indian government with back-doors into its smart phones. RIM and Nokia have declined comment.
The Reuters source article can be found here.
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Only thing I don't get is how those e-mails ended up on Indian servers. Did the Chinese put them there?
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