Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is that why I was modded down last time?
These newspapers have been reporting embarrassing things. Like members of the Communist Party and their family members have vast wealth – implying that this wealth is coming from inside contacts and use (or abuse) of official power. The Communist Party would be interested in who is leaking the details.
Disclosure: I am a former Washington Post employee
The Post doesn't seem to officially be divulging details. Sure, they're reporting on it now that the word is out through a former employee's blog citing an unnamed former employee (neither of those people are me) as a source, but the article actually has a Post spokesperson denying one of the claims of the article (that the Post handed over one of its servers to the NSA for study). This isn't the paper contradicting itself – it's what ethics look like in practice at a good newspaper. The paper can report on itself even when the top brass don't want to.
However, in the New York Times story on its own intrusion, it was stated that AT&T "monitors" the company's network and noticed unusual traffic patterns. AT&T alerted athe Times, who asked them to keep an eye on it, and then brought Mandiant in to consult.
Going back to The Post's story, the company's claim that it did not turn over a server to the NSA casts the issue of China hacking U.S. newspapers in a new light... if you read between the lines. Newspapers (especially The Post and The Times) see themselves as a fiercely-independent check on the government. Watergate-era readers would be as appalled at the idea of The Post handing over servers to the NSA as MacWorld attendees were in the 90s at seeing Bill Gates's face on screen during Job's speech. From a PR perspective, it just looks wrong. China might actually do more to harm these papers by getting them to run into the arms of the U.S. government. It's one thing to think China may have found out you're talking to a reporter... Quite another to think both the U.S. and China may later discover you were the anonymous source for a story they didn't want out. It's unlikely that the NSA is rooting around the server looking for political whistleblowers, but the idea of it has a chilling effect on potential sources who think of The Post as the institution that protected Deep Throat's identity for decades, at great risk to itself.
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.