By SIOBHAN GORMAN
Recent attempts to hack U.S. officials' Gmail accounts are part of a broad Chinese cyberspying scheme, but China's government denies any role. Meanwhile, Nintendo has its own security issues after it was hacked. Andrew LaVallee and Jake Lee discuss.
Chinese cyberspies, who targeted the personal Gmail accounts of top U.S. officials, are trying to gain access to computers belonging to China specialists and defense contractors who circulate in and out of government and talk regularly with those in power, according to security experts who have tracked these schemes.
Chinese cyberspies have for years been trying to gain access to sensitive U.S. computers. This week, Google disclosed an infiltration into personal Gmail accounts of senior U.S. officials. WSJ's Intelligence Correspondent Siobhan Gorman reports.
The stealth infiltration campaign, similar in tactics to the Gmail scheme that Google Inc. disclosed last week, represents cyberspies' efforts to circumvent the high security walls on official government email accounts.
Such targeted "phishing" expeditions involved sending booby-trapped emails to people who have information a hacker is seeking. The emails typically appear to have been sent by a trusted colleague and ask the recipient to open an attachment. When that is done, a malicious software program is placed on the computer that could perform multiple functions, such as tracking all keystrokes or providing full access to an organization's computer network. They frequently are used to obtain access to passwords and private correspondence.
Their occurrence has spiked in the past few months, security experts say. Kevin Mandia, CEO of the security firm Mandiant, said his firm saw four to five times the average number of attacks from China in April. "It was a huge uptick," he said.
The attacks have been traced to China, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are directly ordered by the government. Spokesman Wang Baodong for the Chinese Embassy in Washington denied any government involvement in such cyberspying schemes. "As a responsible player in cyberspace, China strongly opposes unlawful online activities and supports international cooperation in striking down on such misdeeds," he said. "Any claims of so-called Chinese state support for hacking are completely fictitious, and blaming misdeeds on China is irresponsible and unacceptable."
Targeting people on the periphery of power is more likely to pay off because their computer systems are often less protected than the U.S. government, and these individuals frequently discuss sensitive issues with those in government. That was likely why the Google infiltrators targeted the personal emails of government officials.
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