Yesterday, David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google, announced on the company's official blog that they had detected "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [their] corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google." After contacting the concerned U.S. authorities, the company has also discovered that what seemed to be a security incident was in fact part of a greater scheme.
Actually, investigations have found that at least twenty more companies of various domains were the target of a synchronized attack. The hackers managed to compromise the Gmail accounts of dozens of Chinese, European and U.S. citizens, which all appear to be Chinese human rights activists. These accounts have been accessed multiple times by third parties but apparently the hackers have not been able to view more than the subject lines of the emails. Drummond maintains that the accessing of those accounts was not done "through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers."
He also says that Google has decided to share this information because of the implications of the event in the ongoing global debate about freedom of speech. Since the launch of Google.cn in 2006, the company has been criticized about its collaboration with the Chinese government for filtering content available in the Republic of China, but Google thought that offering limited information to the Chinese was still better than no info at all.
In light of the new attacks, though, the search engine might disappear from the screens of Chinese computers pretty soon. Still in the same blog post, Drummond finally announced the following:"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China." This is serious matter because, as noted in a Help Net Security article, "What message does [Google's] contemplation of closing offices in China send to other companies planning to do business in China?" If even a huge company like Google chooses to get out of the fastest-growing economies on Earth, maybe other companies should think twice about the implications of dealing with one of the most intrusive governments.
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