Fergie's Tech Blog

FBI Opens Probe of Hackers In China

Ellen Nakashima and Colum Lynch write on The Washington Post:

The FBI has opened a preliminary investigation of a report that China-based hackers have penetrated the e-mail accounts of leaders and members of the Save Darfur Coalition, a national advocacy group pushing to end the six-year-old conflict in Sudan.

The accounts of 10 members were hacked into between early February and last week, and the intruders also gained access to the group's Web server and viewed pages from the inside, the group said yesterday.

The intruders, said coalition spokesman M. Allyn Brooks-LaSure, "seemed intent on subversively monitoring, probing and disrupting coalition activities." He said Web site logs and e-mails showed Internet protocol addresses that were traced to China.

The allegation fits a near decade-old pattern of cyber-espionage and cyber-intimidation by the Chinese government against critics of its human rights practices, experts said. It comes as calls for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics have been mounting since China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters last week.

posted by Fergie @ 3/20/2008 07:40:00 PM