For the last
five months there has been a large scale effort to obtain information
about American jet powered and space based (X-37) UAVs via Internet
hacking. The methods, and source of the attack, have been traced back to
China. The attacks were done via Internet based attacks against
specific civilian, military and government individuals. This sort of
thing is often carried out in the form of official looking email, with a
file attached, sent to people at a specific military or government
organization. It is usually an email they weren't expecting. This is
known in the trade as "spear fishing" (or "phishing"), which is a Cyber
War technique that sends official looking email to specific individuals,
with an attachment which, if opened, secretly installs a program that
sends files from the email recipient's PC to the spear fisher's
computer. In the last year, an increasing number of military,
government, and contractor personnel have received these
official-looking emails, with a PDF document attached, and asking for
prompt attention.
This comes a year after the discovery of a China based
espionage group, called the Shadow Network, which had hacked into PCs
used by military and civilian personnel working for the Indian armed
forces, and made off with huge quantities of data.
Examination of the viruses and related bits of computer code
indicate that most of this stuff was created by Chinese speaking
programmers, and all movement of command and stolen data led back to
servers in China.
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