A cyber attack on US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was thought to have had an Indian connection, is now being linked to China.
The commission’s site contains some related to the work of the commission, which was set up by Congress to take a critical look at a wide range of US dealings with China.
The US body closely monitors India-China relations which of late has been attacked by several amateurs.
William Reinsch, until recently the Chairman of the Security Review Commission, told National Foreign Trade Council (NTFC), a Washington-based pro-trade Group, that their observation in November had revealed that large quantities of its message traffic had been hacked, and the authorities then started looking into the matter closely.
US officials, on condition of anonymity, said they zeroed in on some intruders likely to be Chinese, rather than belonging to the Indian spy service.
A cache of email data reviewed by a major news agency indicates that the principal target was not the Commission but NFTC.
Further investigation revealed the exact target of the hacking based on two inferences which pointed out to Reinsch’s email account at NFTC being taken over.
Reinisch said he saw no reason why Indian government or spies would be interested in him.
It also shows the hackers were looking for attacking targets with loopholes in cyber security, and orchestrating a ‘blended’ attack, starting from lower levels of security to the highest.
However, there was not any indication hackers got close to the most crucial documents about the most secret project – classified version of the Commission’s annual report.
