Cyber Espionage, Brought to You by the Chinese Communist Party

People may have heard of all kinds of cyber-espionage stories. But none is as strange as this one. Chinese hackers are reported to have penetrated 103 government offices. This means that they can break into most of the electronic doors around the world. Can you imagine: as you sit comfortably in a government office working on a computer—assuming unwisely that it is guarded like your border—someone in China can watch every keystroke including spaces and deletions? A system like this has been uncovered recently by researchers in Canada—a system called Ghostnet. Daisy is a senior IT consultant who helps clients improve their network security. She describes the security compromise as follows: a user is tricked to open a document or a web page containing malware, and then some backdoor programs are planted on his computer. "On many of the Trojans we inspected, [we found that] they opened network connections to some network addresses inside China. Many of these Trojans contained key-loggers, which captured every single keystroke that the user made. These Trojans are becoming harder and harder to detect and remove. Once a user’s computer has such a Trojan implanted on it, a lot of information can get leaked out." Read more.