Journalists' Yahoo E-Mail Accounts Compromised In China

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 31, 2010 @12:09AM from the perhaps-it-was-smersh dept.

andy1307 writes "According to this article in the New York Times, 'In what appears to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address. ... The victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States, an analyst who writes about China's security apparatus and several print journalists based in Beijing and Taipei, the capital of Taiwan."

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Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-03-31 00:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

China is a totalitarian state. Has been since 1949. What free trade has done is to make it a rich totalitarian state instead of a poor one. I never understood the argument that capitalism would lead to anything like democracy. Democracy [usually] leads to at least some level of capitalist/free-enterprise economy, but not the other way around.
Re:Damn Chinese! by muckracer · 2010-03-31 01:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

> https is very easy to MITM if you can inject bogus signed certificates.
agreed
> For that you need to control a CA.
agreed
> for example, CNNIC whose root certificate is included in MSIE and Firefox.
agreed
> Bug 542689 - Please remove CNNIC CA root certificate from NSS
agreed BUT: Why do you single out this particular CA when the valid issues you raised APPLY TO ALL OF THEM?!