Suspected Chinese cyber attack may have ties to two schools in China

The New York Times is reporting that the Chinese cyber attack launched on Google and other major companies, which was made public last month, may have ties to one university and one vocational school in mainland China. While most of the collected data seems to point to servers in Taiwan, two anonymous Times sources claim there is evidence that indicates the attacks may have originated from the Lanxiang Vocational School and Shanghai Jiaotong University. Jiaotong Unitversity, “has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities” reports the Times. And the Lanxiang School, whose network is run by Google competitor Baidu, often provides training to computer scientists for China’s military. Security experts say that finding a specific point of origin may be impossible. The Chinese use a distributed cyber espionage model, often using overly patriotic civilian hackers, which makes the attacks extremely hard to pin point. Representatives from both Chinese schools claim that they had not heard about the accusations when asked to comment.

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