Travel Agent

The Great Firewall of China strikes back! A friend in China sent an email to inform me that this blog – Chronicles of Kotsengkuba – can’t be accessed in his area (Hangzhou, China).

Anyway, this entry is not about my blog’s blockage in China. It’s about something more fishy, like some phishing attacks originating from China’s cyberspace.

Google reported that sometime in December last year, they had encountered a detected a massive invasion on their corporate infrastructure which resulted in a large-scale theft of intellectual properly from the internet company. Such attack was said to detected coming from China. What’s worse was that the said attacks appeared to be trying to gain access from GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

“… we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

“… as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.”

More from the official Google Blog.

Something smells fishy. And that kind of smellcould tell that it could only come from a “Mandarin Fish“.