|
Saturday, 16 January 2010 21:36 |
|
Last weekend I related communications I had with The Jester, an individual who has decided to express his outrage at Jihadist organizations by systematically taking down their web sites. This week we learned that engineers at Google had been engaging in their own form of cyber vigilantism by hacking into a command and control server in Taiwan. In what is rapidly turning into a game-changing story we are getting reports that 33 or more organizations have succumbed to what many experts are claiming to be very sophisticated attacks against their networks with the intent of stealing intellectual property, and in the case of Google, targeted the identities of outspoken Chinese activists.
Even from the first announcement it was apparent that Google engineers had tapped into a server that was involved with the attacks they had witnessed. How else would they have discovered the other targets? This is a familiar story. It is how Shawn Carpenter got embroiled in Titan Rain in 2004. It is how the Israeli police uncovered the Israeli Trojan fiasco. It is how the SecDev researchers traced the extent of GhostNet.
I can think of two ways that Google could have hacked into a server in Taiwan without engaging in legally questionable activity. 1. They contacted the owner of the server and asked. Or 2. They were the owners of the server. Either way there are some un-answered questions in the Google-China affair.
|
