More on the Google attacks
Following on from this we have two updates.
The first is that America is to lodge a formal protest against China over the cyber attack.
“The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy”
Hillary Clinton
It’s now thought that up to 30 companies,including Adobe Systems Inc, may also have been hit by the attack.
The U.S. Department of State will issue an official demarche in Beijing early next week expressing U.S. concerns over the attacks and demanding an explanation, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley was quoted as saying in a Reuters report.
Google earlier this week said that it had been the target of cyberattacks by agents who appeared to be working at the behest of the Chinese government.
Analysts are saying that policies,formal protests or even cyber attack retaliation won’t do much good against China. It’s now largely up to the companies hit by the attacks to fight for themselves.
Microsoft confirmed Thursday that a security flaw in their web browser Internet Explorer aided the cyber attacks on Google and the other companies.
They said the security hole can be closed by setting the browsers security zone to High.
The flaw was originally identified by McAfee and later confirmed by Microsoft.
McAfee said on Thursday that those who engineered the attacks tricked employees of the companies into clicking on a link to a website that secretly downloaded sophisticated malicious software onto their PCs through a campaign that the hackers apparently dubbed “Operation Aurora.”
“We have never seen attacks of this sophistication in the commercial space. We have previously only seen them in the government space,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a vice president of research with McAfee.
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