HUA HIN, Thailand - In a campaign
that lasted over five years, hackers infiltrated
and raided computer systems of international
corporations, governments, Olympic committees and
the United Nations. Internet security companies
have released reports this week implicating China
once again in what could be one of the largest
cyber-attacks ever discovered.
Server logs
analyzed by California-based McAfee reported that
over 72 companies, governments and groups in 14
countries had been targeted and hacked. The source
of the incursions has been traced to servers in at
least two of China’s major cities, Beijing and
Shanghai. The operation, dubbed Shady RAT (remote
access tool), has resulted in an unprecedented
transfer of wealth, according to McAfee vice
president Dmitri Alperovitch.
The victims
of the cyber-attack were widespread and ranged
from South Korean steel companies to US real
estate companies to
multinational oil companies,
news organizations, defense contractors, Asian and
Western national Olympic committees and Canadian
government departments.
Several networks
of automated remote software systems originating
in China have been discovered over the past couple
of years by Google and various Internet security
research companies. Chinese telecoms companies
were cooperative in assisting with the location of
the source of the attacks; however, government
officials repeatedly rebuff accusations of
cyber-espionage implicating the People's Republic.
An account of McAfee's investigation in
Vanity Fair, which claimed an exclusive on the
story, said perhaps more troubling than the
attacks was the reluctance of many victims,
including the World Anti-doping Agency, to accept
they had been attacked, sometimes rejecting offers
of assistance from McAfee.
"We've seen
this before," Alperovitch told Vanity Fair.
"Victims don’t want to know they're victims."
Last August, chip giant Intel agreed to
pay US$7.7 billion to acquire McAfee - a 60%
premium over McAfee's share price.
Internet Search engine and
browser statistics released this week show little
change from recent trends between the top players.
Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars
into its search engine Bing to catch the runaway
train Google. Last month gave the software giant
something to smile about as Bing climbed to a
14.1% US market share in June from 11% the
previous month, according to industry analyst
ComScore.
Google continues to pull away
though with an increase of 4.6% to 65.5% market
share in June. Both companies have made gains at
the expense of Yahoo, which continues to slide and
remained at 15.9% for the month. Microsoft's
partnership with Yahoo sees it in control of
almost 30% of the search market, although that is
still less than half of Google's slice.
The company is looking at ways of changing
the way people search and getting away from the
traditional "ten blue links" that have powered
Google into the lead. Balancing the books is
proving to be tough; for the latest fiscal year
that ended in June, Microsoft's online services
division, mainly the search business, lost $2.56
billion. The unit’s revenue rose 15%, to $2.53
billion, however the losses still outweighed the
gains.
Among browsers there was little
change, with Internet Explorer and Firefox both
dropping less than a percentage point and Chrome
and Safari both gaining a fraction. July ended
with Internet Explorer down just under 1% to
52.81% and Firefox down 0.19 points to 21.48%.
Chrome and Safari both made small gains, of 0.34
and 0.57 points, to 13.45% and 8.05%,
respectively. Opera remained the same with 1.65%.
If the trend continues, Internet Explorer
will lose the majority market share by the end of
the year but it will still remain the most popular
web browser. Version adoption is also slow in the
Microsoft camp as 15.5% of Internet users are
still on IE 6 or 7 and the majority, 29.3%, are
using IE 8. The fact that IE 9 does not work with
Windows XP, which is still used by 49.84% of web
users, probably exacerbates this problem.
Mozilla is putting out a quicker version
of Firefox, but a large proportion of users, which
may well be enterprises, are still sticking to
version 3.6, which remains supported and patched.
Firefox 6 will be released sometime later this
month.
Telecoms Research In
Motion is releasing five new Blackberry smart
phones this week. An injection of excitement into
its product range has been long overdue and the
new touch screen models running the latest
Blackberry 7 mobile OS could well provide it.
The new BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930
phones feature a 2.4 inch touch screen sitting on
top of a full physical keyboard. They are the
sleekest units to date from RIM, each measuring
0.41 of an inch in thickness. Technical
specifications include a 5 megapixel camera, 8
gigabytes of storage (expandable via memory card),
and 1.2Ghz processors.
Also in the lineup
are two new Blackberry Torch 9850 and 9860 models,
which will compete directly with the iPhone. They
are full touch screen only and feature a 3.7-inch
display with a resolution of 800 by 480, with
Flash and 720p High Definition video recording.
The largest global launch of Blackberry
smart phones in company history will see the new
handsets become available to over 200 carriers
worldwide by the end of the year.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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