Chinese Telecoms May Be Spying on Large Numbers of Foreign Customers

theatlantic.com
A U.S. Congressional probe is investigating whether China's state-linked firms, which built much of the communications infrastructure in several Asian countries, is using its access for snooping.

Two Chinese telecommunications giants are under scrutiny by a US congressional committee. The outcome of the probe could have revealing implications for Central Asian states, which have used these companies to modernize their telecom sectors.
US legislators have expressed concern that Huawei and ZTE act as front companies for the Chinese government, and represent a grave "cyber-security threat." The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, asserted during a congressional hearing last October that China is engaged in the "brazen and wide-scale theft of intellectual property from foreign commercial competitors."
"Attributing this espionage isn't easy, but talk to any private sector cyber analyst, and they will tell you there is little doubt that this is a massive campaign being conducted by the Chinese government," he added.

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Texas constable admits ordering bugging

chron.com

DALLAS (AP) — A small-town Texas constable told the FBI he secretly bugged other officials' offices after they were accused of illegally forcing motorists to forfeit their cash, according to a search warrant affidavit.

The affidavit, based on interviews conducted by FBI agents and Texas Rangers, quotes Shelby CountyConstable Fred Walker as saying he authorized the installation of hidden surveillance cameras and digital recorders even though he didn't have legal authority. It also includes a statement from a witness who claims Walker helped organize a scheme to sell drugs seized from suspects.

It's just another chapter in a longtime drama in Tenaha, a town of 1,160 near the Louisiana border, where seizures of cash from motorists stopped for traffic violations along U.S. Highway 59 — a well-known drug route that runs from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada — have led to lawsuits and a federal criminal investigation.

Walker, 53, was Tenaha's city marshal at the time the alleged bugging occurred. He was elected constable in 2010.

In a brief phone interview, Walker said he knew nothing about the affidavit, filed in U.S. District Court in Lufkin on Feb. 6. When asked if he arranged to have offices bugged, he hung up.

Walker's attorney, Bassey Akpaffiong of Houston, said prosecutors have told him to expect an indictment. Akpaffiong said Walker was never involved in selling drugs and never told the FBI he authorized the installation of secret listening devices.

Malcolm Bales, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, declined to comment.

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Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery

Note: Having recently traveled to China, I can attest to Mr. Lieberthal's concerns....Do yourself (and your company) a favor, Just accept the fact that you "will" be collected against...and take Mr. Lieberthal's advice...very seriously.  JDL

nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.
He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets.


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Anons' FBI Phone Snooping Casts Long Shadow on Cybersecurity

technewsworld.com

Members of Anonymous managed to tap into an FBI conference call recently, after which they put a recording of the call on the open Web. The news has raised concern in many corners of the security industry. "The odds are that cybersecurity at the FBI and Scotland Yard is on par with, or superior to, security at most corporations," Abrams said.

The hacker community Anonymous on Friday landed another blow in its war with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

It posted an internal memo from the law enforcement agency about an upcoming international call to discuss hackers. Anonymous also put up a recording of the call itself onYouTube.

The attacks are part of a concerted hacker effort against the FBI.

"The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained," the FBI said in a statement sent to TechNewsWorld by spokesperson Jenny Shearer. "A criminal investigation is underway to identify and hold accountable those responsible." 

The recorded call was a conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard regarding tracking Anonymous members and other digital activists. It also involved other details about the efforts against such groups.

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Bugging equipment found in Mexico lawmaker offices

philstar.com

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A search of several Mexican lawmakers' offices turned up recording equipment, leading legislators to believe they have been spied on for years, a congressman said Wednesday.
Congressman Armando Rios said security personnel found microphones and other devices that seemed to have been installed years ago.

"Some of the equipment has newer technology, but other devices are from a long time ago, which leads us to believe they were installed years ago," said Rios, a member of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD

Rios said the offices of key committees and of several lawmakers from different political parties were bugged.

"What is at stake is the vulnerability of the legislature, of one of the powers of the union," Rios said.

Congress president Guadalupe Acosta, also of the PRD, on Tuesday filed a complaint with federal prosecutors, who opened an investigation.

Acosta wouldn't identify the lawmakers who were being spied on or who he thinks was behind the espionage. Rios blamed the government of President Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.
Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire denied Rios' accusations and said the government has done nothing illegal.

Mexico's main intelligence agency allegedly spied on the government's political opponents during the 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

After PAN candidate Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential election, he announced that the agency, the Center for National Security and Investigation, would no longer spy on political opponents. But in 2008, under Calderon, the agency hired a private company to monitor the activities of legislators.

Legislators complained they were being spied on but the government said it was simply collecting public information.

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DARPA-Funded Hacker's Tiny $50 Spy Computer Hides In Offices, Drops From Drones

forbes.com

Even more embarrassing than a student discovering your GPS tracking device on his car, as the FBI found out last year, is having to ask him to give the expensive piece of equipment back.

So security researcher Brendan O’Connor is trying a different approach to spy hardware: building a sensor-equipped surveillance-capable computer that’s so cheap it can be sacrificed after one use, with off-the-shelf parts that anyone can buy and assemble for less than fifty dollars.

At the Shmoocon security conference Friday in Washington D.C., O’Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5 by 4 by 1 inch spy computer. And O’Connor has designed the cheap gadgets to dropped from a drone, plugged inconspicuously into a wall socket, thrown over a barrier, or otherwise put into irretrievable positions to quietly collect data and send it back to the owner over any available Wifi network. With PogoPlugs currently on sale at Amazon for $25, O’Connor built his prototypes with gear that added up to just $46 each.

“If some target is surrounded by bad men with guns, you don’t want to have to retrieve this, but you also don’t want to have to pay four or five hundred dollars for every use,” says O’Connor. “The idea is that it’s as close to free as possible. So you can throw a bunch of these sensors at a target and get away with losing a couple nodes in the process.”

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Alleged spy fed false info in sting to hurt credibility

vancouversun.com

Authorities fed an alleged Canadian naval spy fabricated information as part of a classic "sour milk" counter-intelligence ploy to taint the credibility of secrets the man is suspected of passing to Russia, Postmedia has learned.

"This was done by the book - sour the milk so that you con-fuse the other side," Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former spy service counter-intelligence officer with sources close to the Halifax case, revealed in an interview Friday.

Once naval officials suspected there was a spy in their midst, deliberately flawed information was baited and designed to eventually be discovered by its foreign recipients, casting doubt on the usefulness of any other classified data related to the case.

Juneau-Katsuya said the deception is believed to have worked, and now "they don't know what is true and what is not [and] will have to be suspicious of pretty much everything [given to] them."

While military and RCMP investigators are still gathering details, Juneau-Katsuya said he believes Russia may have been after North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] secrets.

"When you talk about Halifax, you talk about the Atlantic and the Arctic. And when you talk about the Atlantic and Arctic, you talk NATO. And when you talk NATO, you talk Russia," he said.

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Facebook names $2m 'Koobface' hacking gang

telegraph.co.uk
Facebook has publicly identified a gang of five alleged cyber criminals it believes are behind Koobface, a piece of malicious software that has hijacked hundreds of thousands of Facebook users’ computers and made millions for its creators.

After an investigation by Facebook and several independent security researchers, the gang behind Koobface have been named as a group of Russians operating relatively openly in central St Petersburg.

According to their own social networking profiles, the five men have enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. On one group holiday, they visited Spain, Nice and Monte Carlo, before ending the trip at a casino in Germany, according to Sophos, a British security firm involved in the investigation.

The gang were “living the life of the rich and famous”, Sophos said.

Facebook said it has known the identities of the gang for some time, but has decided to name them publicly after being frustrated by the lack of law enforcement action against them. The Telegraph has chosen not to name them for legal reasons.

“We’ve had a picture of one of the guys in a scuba mask on our wall since 2008,” said Ryan McGeehan, manager of investigations at Facebook.

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Cyber-Crimes Pose 'Existential' Threat, FBI Warns

huffingtonpost.com

Despite the increased frequency and severity of online crime and espionage in 2011, many American corporations and consumers are still not taking the threat seriously, the FBI's top cyber official said Thursday.

The risk posed by criminal hackers is "existential, meaning it could eliminate whole companies," said Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director. If hackers were able to tamper with critical infrastructure such as the power grid, "it could actually cause death," Henry said in remarks at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York.

To highlight the growing threat, Henry cited several recent FBI investigations, such as one involving a smaller company that went out of business after hackers stole $5 million from accounts, another concerning a larger firm that "virtually overnight" lost a decade of research and development worth $1 billion, and still another regarding hackers who encrypted millions of records of a health services company and demanded money for the password.

"We've seen the number and sophistication of the attacks by these cyber actors increase dramatically," Henry said.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen, primarily through the financial services sector, just in the last couple years," he said. An organized crime ring in Eastern Europe, for example, earned about $750,000 per week from cyber theft, he added.

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Note: Does your company have a Cyber TSCM / Cyber Counterespionage plan in place? Contact me, I can help. ~JDL

Cyber Attacks May Be Revealed to Investors as SEC Rules Push Disclosures

Note: This was bound to happen as more and more companies become victims of Cyber Espionage. Has your company become a victim of Cyber Espionage? And, more importantly, does your company have a Cyber TSCM / Cyber Counterespionage strategy in place to mitigate this risk? 
Contact me, I can help. ~JDL

bloomberg.com

China-based hackers rifled the computers of DuPont Co. (DD) at least twice in 2009 and 2010, hunting the technological secrets that made the company one of the world’s most successful chemical makers.

It’s not something investors would have learned from DuPont’sregulatory filings, or from those of other companies victimized by hackers. The 10-K’s DuPont submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over the period don’t identify hacking as even a significant risk, much less reveal what two U.S. intelligence officials later said was a successful case of industrial espionage.

Over the next three months, as publicly traded companies file 10-K’s, investors may see new admissions of corporate networks being hacked after the SEC said companies can’t continue to hold back the details of those incidents.

As cyberspies from China, Russia and other countries ransack the computer networks of one major U.S. and European firm after the next, the SEC in October offered its new interpretation of disclosure requirements as applied to cybercrime. The amount of information that’s forthcoming will depend on whether company lawyers determine the incidents had, or will have, a material effect on the enterprise.

Daniel Turner, a spokesman for Wilmington, Delaware-based DuPont, said, regarding the previously-reported hack, “We let our disclosures speak for themselves.”

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Symantec Confirms Anonymous Took Product Source Code

crn.com

Symantec (NSDQ:SYMC) confirmed Friday that an India-based chapter of hacker collective Anonymous had accessed the network of an unidentified third party and had taken source code from two of its corporate security products.

The vendor said code samples provided Thursday to an online community of security professionals called Infosec Island were from two products: Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 and Symantec AntiVirus 10.2. The vendor supports the latter, but no longer sells it, while the former is currently on version 12.1. The code was four or five years old, according to Symantec.

"It would be very difficult to do anything with (the code), because it is so old," Symantec spokesman Cris Paden said.

Malware designed to take advantage of the code would only work on the older products. Therefore, hackers would have to find a company that had not updated its security software in years, an unlikely scenario. "They would have been annihilated a long time ago from cyber threats," Paden said.

Symantec claimed the theft did not indicate that source code in its current products could be taken. The software today is architected differently, so the techniques used to take code from the older products won't work, Paden said. "It's not possible that they would be able to access current-day code."

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How to Know If Someone Bugged Your Room

theatlanticwire.com


For tips on sweeping a room for surreptitious surveillance devices, look no further than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's where members of the federal government have been going for years to find out who's wiretapped their telephone or implanted a microphone in their corner office. And now we know a lot more about the bureau's routine wiretap inspections thanks to GovernmentAttic.org, a website that publishes documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. The site has published a 66MB cache of correspondence from 1952 to 1995 detailing various issues of telephone security often involving paranoid government officials from senators to post master generals to secretaries of the Department of Agriculture to President Richard Nixon who think someone is surreptitiously listening to their conversations. 

It's going to take an army of readers to rummage through the entire cache of FBI documents but from what we've read so far, much of the correspondence involves government officials requesting wiretap inspections from the FBI, typically because they fear sensitive information has leaked from their office, and, upon inspection, the FBI finds nothing. Interestingly, they do often provide an informative report on how they went about sweeping the room.

As you can imagine, the descriptions of wiretap sweeps get much more technical from the '50s to the '70s to the '90s. In the old days, a wiretap inspection was simpler. Take this sweep of the office of Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield in 1953. 

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Note: A "Do it yourself" sweep, is kind of like "do it yourself" plumbing...you get what you pay for...

Don't let those "leaks" continue...contact me, I can help. ~JDL

Anonymous exposes 75,000 credit card numbers

washingtonpost.com

Hacker collective Anonymous has just dumped 200 GB of names, email addresses and passwords for around 860,000 Stratfor users. Anonymous also exposed credit card numbers for 75,000 paying customers of Stratfor.

Stratfor, a security think tank, provides reports on international security and related threats to government and military personnel as well as to the private sector. It is unknown whether Anonymous gained access to other, more sensitive information during the Stratfor hacks, which occurred on December 24.

“The time for talk is over,” wrote Anonymous last night on Pastebin.

“It’s time to dump the full 75,000 names, addresses, CCs and md5 hashed passwords to every customer that has ever paid Stratfor. But that’s not all: we’re also dumping ~860,000 usernames, email addresses, and md5 hashed passwords for everyone who’s ever registered on Stratfor’s site… Did you notice 50,000 of these email addresses are .mil and .gov?”

Anonymous’ motives for the attack are also somewhat hazy. In last night’s statement, representatives of the movement wrote, “All our lives we have been robbed blindly and brutalized by corrupted politicians, establishmentarians and government agencies sex shops, and now it’s time to take it back.”

In addition to the Stratfor attack and exposure, Anonymous is threatening a new action on New Year’s Eve, December 31.

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Internet Crime Complaint Center's (IC3) Scam Alerts December 29, 2011

ic3.gov

This report, which is based upon information from law enforcement and complaints submitted to the IC3, details recent cyber crime trends, new twists to previously-existing cyber scams, and announcements.

POPULAR PASSWORDS

An Internet site who manages passwords recently posted an article pertaining to the lack of secure passwords being utilized which may be a factor in data breaches — past, present, and future. One reason for the lack of security is the amount of passwords a user is required to remember to access the many databases, applications, multiple networks, etc., used on a daily basis. Sharing passwords among users in a workplace is becoming a common theme to continue the flow of operations. Users have prioritized convenience over security when establishing passwords.

The article provided a list of millions of stolen passwords posted on-line by hackers and ranked the top 25 common passwords.

1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1

1. dragon
2. baseball
3. 111111
4. iloveyou
5. master
6. sunshine
7. ashley
8. bailey
9. passw0rd

1. shadow
2. 123123
3. 654321
4. superman
5. qazwsx
6. michael
7. football

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Cameramaker Red claims espionage

variety.com
In a saga worthy of a Hollywood thriller, allegations of email hacking and industrial espionage have surfaced in the camera industry in a lawsuit filed by digital camera maker Red against rival Arri.

In the suit filed Dec. 21 in federal court in Orange County, Calif., Red accuses Arri of stealing technical details and development plans for Red cameras, giving Arri an unfair advantage.

Much of Red's complaint rests on facts revealed in an August plea deal between federal prosecutors and former Arri executive Michael Bravin, who is also a defendant in the suit. Bravin pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of email hacking, admitting as part of the deal that he accessed the email account of Band Pro chief executive Amnon Band.

Bravin, who according to his LinkedIn profile worked for Band Pro for more than 16 years, resigned as Band Pro's chief technology officer to become Arri's VP of market development for digital camera products in January 2010.

From around December 2009 through June 2010, Bravin had access to Amnon Band's email account, as Bravin has admitted. Under his plea deal, he was to serve two months in jail and pay $20,000 in restitution to Band Pro as well as legal costs. Bravin now lists himself on LinkedIn as principal at the Digital Picture Co.

In its complaint, Red asserts that during the time Bravin was hacking Band's email account, Band Pro and Red were discussing a possible joint venture. Red says Band's emails contained detailed descriptions of the technology used in Red's cameras and Red's plans for introducing new models and features.

Red alleges that Bravin passed that information to Arri, giving Arri an unfair competitive advantage, especially with respect to the launch and marketing of the Arri Alexa camera. The Alexa was released in 2010 and is seen as a direct competitor to Red's Epic.

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Wiretap suits OKd against U.S., not telecoms

sfgate.com

The nation's telecommunications companies can't be sued for cooperating with the Bush administration's secret surveillance program, but their customers can sue the government for allegedly intercepting their phone calls and e-mails without a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
In a pair of decisions, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a 2008 law immunizing AT&T and other companies for their roles in wiretapping calls to alleged foreign terrorists, but revived a suit that accused the government of illegally intercepting millions of messages from U.S. residents.
That lawsuit was partly based on testimony in 2003 by former AT&T technician Mark Klein about equipment in the company's office on Folsom Street in San Francisco that allowed Internet traffic to be routed to the government.

'Dragnet' surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights organization representing AT&T customers, claimed the company had similar installations in other cities and used them for "dragnet" surveillance of everyday e-mails and phone calls, which the National Security Agency purportedly screened electronically for connections to terrorism.
"We look forward to proving the program is an unconstitutional and illegal violation of the rights of millions of ordinary Americans," said Cindy Cohn, the foundation's legal director.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined comment.

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U.S. Headed For Cyberwar Showdown With China In 2012

forbes
The new year is likely to bring a distinct shift in U.S. national security priorities, as the Obama Administration and Congress sharpen their response to China’s continuous assault on U.S. information networks.  Although intelligence-community analysts believe the most sophisticated intrusions are being executed by a relatively small number of agents linked to the general staff of China’s Peoples Liberation Army, the damage they are inflicting on U.S. security and economic competitiveness is judged to be extensive.

Thus far, China’s cyber campaign consists mainly of espionage aimed at stealing military secrets and intellectual property.  However, Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the Pentagon’s joint Cyber Command established to counter such campaigns, said in November that, “We see a disturbing track from exploitation to disruption to destruction.”  Alexander wasn’t talking just about the Chinese, but there’s little doubt among intelligence analysts that Beijing is the biggest and most persistent perpetrator of cyber crimes.

The question is what to do about it.  To date, U.S. cyber efforts have been focused mainly on defensive measures, seeking to repel network intruders in a fashion that Alexander likens to the famously failed Maginot Line.  The National Security Agency and other U.S. security organizations are known to have developed their own network-attack capabilities, but former White House cyber-security advisor Richard Clarke has warned that it would be dangerous for the U.S. to step up its own campaign against Chinese networks while U.S. safeguards against retaliation are so weak.

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2012 Will See Rise in Cyber-Espionage and Malware, Experts Say

pcworld.com

The security industry expects the number of cyber-espionage attacks to increase in 2012 and the malware used for this purpose to become increasingly sophisticated.

In the past two years there has been a surge in the number of malware-based attacks that resulted in sensitive data being stolen from government agencies, defense contractors, Fortune 500 companies, human rights organizations and other institutions. (See also "How to Remove Malware From Your Windows PC.")

"I absolutely expect this trend to continue through 2012 and beyond," said Rik Ferguson, director of security research and communication at security firm Trend Micro. "Espionage activities have, for hundreds of years, taken advantage of cutting-edge technologies to carry out covert operations; 2011 was not the beginning of Internet-facilitated espionage, nor will it be the end," he added.

Threats like Stuxnet, which is credited with setting back Iran's nuclear program by several years, or its successor, Duqu, have shocked the security industry with their level of sophistication. Experts believe that they are only the beginning and that more highly advanced malware will be launched in 2012.

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Chinese Computer Hackers Hit U.S. Chamber of Commerce

foxnews

WASHINGTON –  A group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of America's top business-lobbying group and gained access to everything stored on its systems, including information about its three million members, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The break-in at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the boldest known infiltrations in what has become a regular confrontation between U.S. companies and Chinese hackers. The complex operation, which involved at least 300 internet addresses, was discovered and quietly shut down in May 2010.

It isn't clear how much of the compromised data was viewed by the hackers. Chamber officials say internal investigators found evidence that hackers had focused on four Chamber employees who worked on Asia policy, and that six weeks of their email had been stolen.

It is possible the hackers had access to the network for more than a year before the breach was uncovered, according to two people familiar with the Chamber's internal investigation.

One of these people said the group behind the break-in is one that U.S. officials suspect of having ties to the Chinese government. The Chamber learned of the break-in when the FBI told the group that servers in China were stealing its information, this person said. The FBI declined to comment on the matter.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Geng Shuang, said cyberattacks are prohibited by Chinese law and China itself is a victim of attacks. He said the allegation that the attack against the Chamber originated in China "lacks proof and evidence and is irresponsible," adding that the hacking issue shouldn't be "politicized."

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Chinese hackers hit Boston Scientific

massdevice.com
Boston Scientific is one of 760 firms hit by China-based cyber attacks.
Med-tech titan Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX) was one of 760 companies hit by Chinese cyber attacks that also targeted U.S. government agencies, research universities and Internet providers.

It's not clear whether the Natick, Mass.-based medical device maker lost any sensitive information in the attack.

"We're talking about stealing entire industries," Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, told the news service. "This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen."

The attacks were aimed at the medical device, biotechnology, clean energy, advanced semiconductor, high-end manufacturing and information technology industries, according toBloomberg. 

Along with BSX, Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's (NYSE:PFE) Wyeth subsidiary were victims. The Chinese government is denying responsibility for the attacks.

The cyber-warfare is just the latest item in a string of bad luck for Boston Scientific, which got hit with a half-billion-dollar tax bill from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service last week.

The latest tab, for $581 million plus interest and penalties, comes out of an IRS audit of Boston Scientific's 2006 acquisition of pacemaker firm Guidant Corp.

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