Severe Penalties fail to halt growing Cyber War

press release

London, UK, 13th May 1999 - With NATO continuing to bomb Serbia, the Chinese embassy error is causing further outbreaks of hacking throughout the world. A spokesman for mi2g commented today, "As predicted, Chinese anti-NATO hacking protests continue to grow in spite of severe penalties. Only a few months ago two hackers were sentenced to death by a Chinese Court."

Sophisticated espionage software 'Trojans' are the latest weapon deployed in this Cyber War. 'Trojans' have been sent to targets in the West from Far Eastern countries. When the e-mail is opened the virus runs and sets about stealing files and sending them back to the originator's computers via the internet. 'Trojans' can be used as a very effective way of gathering intelligence without risking the lives of agents. The first indication of Trojan action has come from the US Department of Energy (DoE) Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC).

The 11th May mi2g release, citing DoE internet attack has now been confirmed by their spokeswoman, Michelle Del Valle, "the hackers claimed in a message that they were Chinese." The DoE has now started an investigation into how the hackers succeeded in cracking their system. In a related development, Tim Ahearn of the Department of Interior, confirmed that they too had been attacked, their hacker "was traced back to China" and "The FBI is looking into it".

Protests against NATO countries are also being made via a flood of e-mails - some empty and some containing viruses. A large number of strains of viruses have been detected so far by using commercial off-the-shelf anti-viral software. This is not a guarantee for the most advanced forms of virus, especially the ones, which may be time triggered at a pre-set future date. The US Government is now preparing itself for the possibility of a concerted e-mail assault on their servers in an attempt to overload them. Administrators are being advised to employ anti-spam measures to impede all e-mail from China's, '.cn', domain.

In parallel, a Dutch hacker group has broken into a Yugoslavian Web server, replacing an anti-NATO web page with a pro-NATO "Help Kosovo" page

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Notes for the Editor

1. In the first week of January 1999, the Hao brothers, Jinglong and Jingwen, were sentenced to death by a court in East China after they were found guilty of hacking the computer network of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and electronically siphoning off money.
2. In the last week of January 1999, 51 people were arrested on charges of hacking into the Chinese Railway Computer System.
3. More than 2 Million educated Chinese nationals have internet access.