Chinese Authorities Dismiss Allegation Related to Canada Hack

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that hackers from China infiltrated the computers of 2 main economic ministries of the Canadian government thus facilitating the attackers with admission into data that was highly classified. But, Ma Zhaoxu Spokesman of Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the government in China strongly denounced hacking practices as well as other similar offensive deeds. PCWorld published this on February 17, 2011.

Zhaoxu said that China too was victimized with computer hacking therefore the charge alleging that the country backed hacking was baseless.

The cyber assault, which was first identified during early-January 2011, prompted Canadian agencies engaged in counter-espionage to try hard for determining what amount of confidential government data might have been lost as well as to whom.

Apparently, hackers behind the attack aimed at seizing documents, which held classified government data. Additionally, they duped victims into viewing documents that were malevolently encoded, employing popular method named spear-phishing wherein an attacker performs certain study in advance and thereafter selects some victims to whom he dispatches a file that appears very convincing. The file, normally, contains a memorandum of a forthcoming event that seemingly an executive of the organization dispatched, with the attacker expecting his victim will view it and thereby facilitate the computer-hack.

Said Security Analyst Michel Juneau-Katsuya who was an ex-officer of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service after going through the record, every sign suggested that the attack originated from China. DailyTech published this on February 17, 2011.

Meanwhile, following the identification of the leak, Canada was compelled to take innumerable servers offline during January 2011. Despite that the country tried all means for hushing the incident. Moreover, the Communications Security Establishment of Canada hasted for knowing the attack's details as also recovering control.

State security specialists, the spear-phishing method has yielded success when applied against USA's government contractors and agencies. Several entities feel that these particular assaults have been consistently coming from the Chinese government for cyber-espionage, though impossible to establish. Actually, various kinds of cyber-assaults are frequently waged through China and it's likely the hacker within the latest episode just diverted traffic via the Chinese Web-servers.

Related article: Chinese Hackers Threatening Korean Game Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 2/24/2011