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Washington Post: We Were Also Hacked By the Chinese
tsu doh nimh writes "A sophisticated cyberattack targeted The Washington Post in an operation that resembled intrusions against other major American news organizations and that company officials suspect was the work of Chinese hackers, the publication acknowledged on Friday. The disclosure came just hours after a former Post employee shared information about the break-in with ex-Postie reporter Brian Krebs, and caps a week marked by similar stories from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Krebs cites a former Post tech worker saying that the publication gave one of its hacked servers to the National Security Agency for analysis, a claim that the Post's leadership denies. The story also notes that the Post relied on software from Symantec, the same security software that failed to detect intrusions at The New York Times for many months."
Those of us who have traced APT through a few proxies (typically only one) back to a large building owned by various Chinese government agencies can assure you that a very large scale industrial espionage program is underway, with occasional sidelines into attempting to trace methods and sources. There are mountains of evidence, most of it feed into shredders under the instruction of corporate lawyers. And most US corporations are so dependent on deeply flawed Microsoft technologies and caught so deep in political games that most of the time they'd rather bury their head in the sand and ask subordinates to delete all evidence than actually do anything proper about it. IT is a cost center, and you can't demonstrate security ROI in a way that passes modern MBA scrutiny. All corporate divisions exist only to bump the stock price this quarter, which means we have to keep cutting cost and overhead. With few exceptions, investment is basically dead in the US corporate world.