Tracing the Attack

By Brad

Last month, Google announced it would be ending its business efforts in China following an apparent cyberattack on the company and others from the nation. Now, the New York Times reports, an investigation conducted in part by the National Security Agency has traced the attacks to two schools in China:

If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.