Step side Russia: the new global hacking bogeyman is now officially China.
Just days after the US accused Beijing of hacking hundreds of millions of Marriott accounts and extracting the private data of countless Americans, even as the ongoing diplomatic feud over Chinese "Intermediation" in western communications via the likes of Huawei escalates, moments ago the EU unveiled that China was now also the new Wikileaks, accusing hacker tied to China's People's Liberation Army of a "Huge hack" of its diplomatic cables and reviving fears about vulnerabilities in the 28-country bloc's data systems.
According to investigators, hackers had accessed cables on a variety of geopolitical issues including terrorism, transatlantic relations, peace in the Middle East, arms control, the South China Sea and the Asia and Oceania working party.
In a hack surprisingly reminiscent of how "The Russians" got access to John Podesta's email, Area 1 said the hackers initially accessed the system using unsophisticated phishing techniques, sending an email with a malicious link or attachment to people inside the ministry in Cyprus.
The hack is the latest to involve China, whose government reached an agreement with the Obama administration in 2015 designed to curtail corporate espionage hacking companies to steal intellectual property or data, but it did not directly address more conventional cyber espionage against governments.
The thousands of hacked documents revealed concerns in the EU "About an unpredictable Trump administration and struggles to deal with Russia and China and the risk that Iran would revive its nuclear programme", according to the New York Times, which also had access to the trove.
As for Cyprus being used as the entry point, that too is hardly a coincidence: the alleged use of the Mediterranean island as the "Unwitting gateway" for the hack is likely to intensify some EU states' security focus on Nicosia, after concerns about Russian money and influence there.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-19/china-accused-huge-hack-thousands-european-diplomatic-cables
Just days after the US accused Beijing of hacking hundreds of millions of Marriott accounts and extracting the private data of countless Americans, even as the ongoing diplomatic feud over Chinese "Intermediation" in western communications via the likes of Huawei escalates, moments ago the EU unveiled that China was now also the new Wikileaks, accusing hacker tied to China's People's Liberation Army of a "Huge hack" of its diplomatic cables and reviving fears about vulnerabilities in the 28-country bloc's data systems.
According to investigators, hackers had accessed cables on a variety of geopolitical issues including terrorism, transatlantic relations, peace in the Middle East, arms control, the South China Sea and the Asia and Oceania working party.
In a hack surprisingly reminiscent of how "The Russians" got access to John Podesta's email, Area 1 said the hackers initially accessed the system using unsophisticated phishing techniques, sending an email with a malicious link or attachment to people inside the ministry in Cyprus.
The hack is the latest to involve China, whose government reached an agreement with the Obama administration in 2015 designed to curtail corporate espionage hacking companies to steal intellectual property or data, but it did not directly address more conventional cyber espionage against governments.
The thousands of hacked documents revealed concerns in the EU "About an unpredictable Trump administration and struggles to deal with Russia and China and the risk that Iran would revive its nuclear programme", according to the New York Times, which also had access to the trove.
As for Cyprus being used as the entry point, that too is hardly a coincidence: the alleged use of the Mediterranean island as the "Unwitting gateway" for the hack is likely to intensify some EU states' security focus on Nicosia, after concerns about Russian money and influence there.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-19/china-accused-huge-hack-thousands-european-diplomatic-cables
No comments:
Post a Comment