What's Happening in Information Security

I’ve been following Robert McMillan’s coverage in Computerworld of Google’s disclosure that Google and a number of other companies including Adobe Systems were the target of cyberattacks potentially ordered by the Chinese Government. The Chinese cybercriminals were trying to steal the email records of political dissidents. This highly visible cybercrime underscores the importance and difficulty of protecting information assets and implementing threat detection systems.

The attacks came within hours of Google hosting a closed-door symposium on circumventing censorship. Soon the company's enterprise security management team realized that it was dealing with more than just a few hacked workstations. McMillan reports that Google suggests that the attacks were a  “state-sponsored corporate espionage campaign that compromised more than 30 technology, financial and media companies, most of them global Fortune 500 enterprises.”

Hillary Clinton, speaking as the US Secretary of State, said that coordinated hacking campaigns like this “raise serious concerns” and that "The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy."

Sources familiar with the situation say that the attacks exploited an unpatched bug in widely used software and were able to gain footholds in these companies and siphon out valuable intellectual property.

Disturbing to me is that the goal of the attackers, according to Google’s Drummond, was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. China is a powerful global economy with a culture and value system very different from our western culture. Without criticizing the way the Chinese government harasses segments of their population or chooses to restrict and limit their rights, this is a good example of how their behavior is impacting my rights. I’m a google mail user in my off hours and the fact that an attack, potentially ordered by the Chinese government, puts my privacy at risk is troubling.

What do you think? Is it possible to determine the absolute source of attacks in order to prevent cyber attacks from Chinese cyber criminals in the future?