Cyber spies hack into government embassies globally

Toronto: A cyber spy network based mainly in China hacked into classified documents from government and private organisations in 103 countries, including the computers of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exiles, Canadian researchers said.

The work of the Information Warfare Monitor initially focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community in exile, and eventually led to a much wider network of compromised machines, the Internet-based research group said.

"We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama," investigator Greg Walton said.

The research group said that while it's analysis points to China as the main source of the network, it has not conclusively been able to detect the identity or motivation of the hackers.

Calls to China's Foreign Ministry and Industry and Information Ministry rang unanswered yesterday. The Chinese Embassy in Toronto did not immediately return calls for comment.

Students For a Free Tibet activist Bhutila Karpoche said her organisation's computers have been hacked into numerous times over the past four or five years, and particularly in the past year. She said she often gets e-mails that contain viruses that crash the group's computers. The IWM is composed of researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. The group's initial findings led to a 10-month investigation summarised in the report released online on Sunday.

The researchers detected a cyber espionage network involving over 1,295 compromised computers from the ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan. They also discovered hacked systems in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.

Once the hackers infiltrated the systems, they gained control using malware - software they install on the compromised computers - and sent and received data from them.

How do you call to book people for cyber crimes of this nature? Do you think the international community is not giving enough attention to the problems cyber spies can cause?

Cyber crime is a problem and will become at large in the future. Government organisations should pay extra attention to their IT securities, as if that is strong cyber crime will be really difficult to perform.
Adil Waseem
Dubai,UAE
Posted: March 30, 2009, 13:14

The authorities are to be blamed as their system is vulnerable to such attacks.Since every Govt is trying to make everything online and interconnected, they are not aware that many of their staff have no proper knowledge to even operate such system or even to recognise that an email attachment could be a virus or not.
Abdullah
Abu Dhabi,UAE
Posted: March 30, 2009, 08:22

They should be punished strictly without any mercy because they can misuse this information for a bad cause.
Santosh
Dubai,UAE
Posted: March 30, 2009, 07:55