Google Fueds with China Over Gmail Hack
China denies involvement in Google hackings
AP

BEIJING (AP) - China sharply rebuked the United States on Monday, denying involvement in any Internet attacks and defending its online restrictions as lawful after Washington urged Beijing to investigate an attack against Google.

The search engine giant announced on Jan. 12 that it would pull out of China unless the government relaxes its rules on censorship. The ultimatum came after Google said e-mail accounts of human rights activists critical of China had been hacked.

Since then, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has criticized the censorship of cyberspace, drawing a strong counterattack from Beijing. The Foreign Ministry on Friday said her remarks damaged bilateral relations, while a Chinese state newspaper said Washington was imposing "information imperialism" on China.

On Monday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology went on the offensive again, saying the country's anti-hacking policy is transparent and consistent.

"Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyberattacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to discredit China," an unidentified ministry spokesman said, according to a transcript of an interview with the official Xinhua News Agency posted on the ministry's Web site.

The increasingly heated environment is likely to pose challenges to negotiating an arrangement that would suit both Google's and China's interests.

The company says it remains optimistic it can persuade China's ruling party to loosen restrictions on free expression on the Internet, so it can keep doing business in the country. However, China's government has given little indication it's willing to budge.

"Increasingly, the line emerging from the Chinese government is harder and less open to compromise," said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics based in Beijing. "Hillary Clinton's speech was seen by many officials here as the United States' laying down a marker and put matters in a more confrontational mode."

The Communist Party's official People's Daily newspaper also accused the U.S. government of strictly controlling the Internet at home on Monday while urging other countries to build an "Internet freedom utopia."

"In reality, this 'Internet freedom' that it is marketing everywhere is nothing but a diplomatic strategy, and only an illusion of freedom," the paper said.

Xinhua also cited the State Council, China's Cabinet, as criticizing what it called interference in the country's domestic affairs.

Internet control is considered a critical matter of state security in China. Beijing promotes Internet use for commerce, but heavily censors content it deems pornographic, anti-social or politically subversive and blocks many foreign news and social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, and the popular video-sharing site YouTube.

Google said it had uncovered a computer attack that tried to plunder its software coding and the Gmail accounts of human rights activists protesting Chinese policies. The company traced the attacks on its computers to hackers in China, but hasn't directly tied them to the Chinese government or its agents.

A Chinese Internet security official questioned the allegation, saying Google had not reported its complaints to China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team.

"We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary," Zhou Yonglin, the team's deputy chief of operations, said in an interview with Xinhua posted on the team's Web site.

Zhou said the team logged attacks on 262,000 Chinese computers last year by hackers implanting malicious software such as Trojans, which can allow outside access to the target's computer. More than 16 percent of the attacks came from computers located in the U.S., he said.

Foreign Reporter's G-mail Hacked in China

AP

BEIJING (AP) - International journalists in China said Monday that their Google e-mail accounts have been hacked in attacks similar to the ones against human rights activists that the search giant cited as a reason for considering pulling out of the country.

In announcing a possible exit from China last week, Google did not specify how the accounts with its Gmail e-mail service were hacked into or by whom. Information since then has trickled out.

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China sent an e-mail Monday to its members warning that reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing said their Gmail accounts had been broken into, with their e-mails surreptitiously forwarded to unfamiliar accounts.

Although the warning did not name the organizations, one of the accounts belonged to an Associated Press journalist.

John Daniszewski, senior managing editor for international news at the news cooperative in New York, deplored the breach and said the AP will be investigating to determine if any vital information was compromised.

The foreign correspondents' club asked its members to be vigilant in protecting their e-mail accounts and computers from attack.

"We remind all members that journalists in China have been particular targets of hacker attacks in the last two years," the club's message read. "Please be very careful what you click on, and run virus checks regularly."

Google's announcement Tuesday that it might quit the huge Chinese market shocked the international business community and cheered many free-speech advocates. Google said a sophisticated attack in December from China targeted the Mountain View, California-based company's infrastructure and at least 20 other major companies from the Internet, financial services, technology, media and chemical industries.

Google said only two e-mail accounts were infiltrated in the attacks, with basic information such as subject lines and the dates that the individual accounts were created accessed. In its investigation, Google said it found that dozens of accounts of human rights advocates in China, the U.S. and Europe were routinely accessed by third parties, not due to a security breach at Google, but through viruses and spy software secretly placed on the users' computers.

The tactics used against the journalists are similar to those described by one human rights activist. After Google's announcement, Beijing law professor and human-rights lawyer Teng Biao wrote on his blog that someone broke into his Gmail account and forwarded e-mails to another account. The attack made use of a service that Gmail and other Web-based e-mail services offer, allowing users to set e-mail addresses to which their mail can be forwarded automatically.

Another activist said she was notified by David Drummond, Google's top lawyer, on Jan. 7 about an intrusion into her account. Tenzin Seldon, a Tibetan rights activist and sophomore at Stanford University, said she allowed her laptop to be inspected by Google's security experts, who found no viruses on the machine.

China-based international correspondents have seen their e-mail accounts hit by periodic waves of cyberattacks and snooping from undetermined sources over the past two years. The AP, Agence France-Presse, Dow Jones, Reuters and other news organizations were targeted in September in an attack in which viruses were implanted in ordinary looking e-mails.

The e-mails, which appeared to be from an editor of an English-language paper in Singapore, bore an attachment that once opened would install malware - malicious software - on computers, said a report late last year by computer security experts McAfee Inc.