Evidence Found of Chinese Involvement in Google Breach

Posted 01/20/2010 at 6:31am | by Paul Lilly

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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the Cookie Monster was up to when he gets his hand caught in the cookie jar, and in similar fashion, the evidence is starting to pile up against China in its suspected involvement in the recent attacks against Google.

After a series of highly sophisticated cyberattacks targeting Google and 33 other large U.S. companies in the technology, financial, and defense sectors took place last week, fingers began pointing at China, where Google says the Internet break-ins originated from. And while email accounts of several Chinese human rights activists were compromised in the attacks, there hasn't been any irrefutable proof, at least until now, sasy an American computer researcher.

Joe Stewart, a malware guru with SecureWorks, says he has figured out the main program used in the attack contained a module based on an unusual algorithm from a Chinese technical paper that had only been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites, The New York Times reports.

"If you look at the code in a debugger you see patterns that jump out at you," Stewart said.

Stewart, a self-proclaimed "reverse engineer," said that he couldn't rule out that the evidence was intentionally placed in the program by its programmers, but said such a scenario is unlikely.