Google Publicly Announces the Issues with China Hackers
Late last night, Google announced that they would be putting an end to some of the security blocks that exist within their Chinese search engine. Bascially, Google was asked by the government to restrict some pages from their index in order to prevent the Chinese people from accessing certain content. If you didn't already know, the Chinese government has a lot of control over the content it's people sees. Public TV and the internet are monitored heavily by the government. With the emergence of technology, many young Chinese entrepreneurs have began to work their way out of poverty and into economic wealth. Most of these successful entrepreneurs have joined other activists and are speaking out about thier country's policies and procedures. Of course, the Chinese government does not take well to protesters. Therefore, to place itself in a safe haven, Google agreed to banned certain web pages from their index.
THAT BAN IS NOW BEING LIFTED!
Why? Recently Google discovered that some Chinese hackers had been targeting the system to retrieve the GMAIL accounts of popular Chinese activitsts and other activists. This of course, is completly illegal and Google is firing back. "We believe in free speech," says Google who has moved forward with the bold decision of lifting some of the censorship. However, this bold move may actually force Google to leave China. With Chinas's emerging economy, this could be a big blow to the major engine. Below is an excerpt from their announcement taken from: Google Blog.
"Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised."
photo courtesy of http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/img/google-beta.jpg
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