Journalists’ E-Mails Hacked in China

[TomCADem]

Source: NY Times

BEIJING — In what appears to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers disabled its Web site for a fifth straight day.

The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address.

The attacks, most of which began last Thursday, occurred the same week that Google angered the Chinese government by routing Internet search engine requests out of the mainland to a site in Hong Kong. Google said the move was prompted by its objections to censorship rules and by a spate of attacks on Google e-mail users that the company suggested had originated in China.

Those cyberattacks, which began as early as last April, affected dozens of American corporations, law firms and individuals, many of them rights advocates critical of China’s authoritarian government.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/world/asia/31china.html

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Perhaps Google just wanted to avoid the bad publicity that goes along with cooperating with China's crackdown on political dissidents. Perhaps folks should consider boycotting Yahoo for its tacit cooperation in such efforts.

[DissedByBush]

1. "have been compromised by unknown intruders"

Unknown. Yeah, right.

We don't know their names, but we know who they are working for.