Well, not so much “hit” as deluge. Turns out our nation’s largest business lobbying group had hackers coming in and out of their network with no less than six points of entry. The hacks were seen as very sophisticated, not so much in the technology, but as to whom they targeted. Specifically, four employees whose work focused on Asia policy had their email accounts monitored and copied for, at least, six straight weeks. The attacks were discovered and shut down in May 2010, and Chamber of Commerce officials say there’s no telling exactly how long its systems were under surveillance. Government officials in Beijing, of course, says China had nothing to do with the break-ins, but as the Wall Street Journal reports, “certain technical aspects of the attack suggested it was carried out by a known group operating out of China.”
Although infected computers were destroyed and security systems updated, the Journal continues, “The Chamber continues to see suspicious activity, they say. A thermostat at a town house the Chamber owns on Capitol Hill at one point was communicating with an Internet address in China, they say, and, in March, a printer used by Chamber executives spontaneously started printing pages with Chinese characters.” That’s right, a thermostat. And we all know what it means when the internal temperature of a Chamber of Commerce townhouse is being monitored, don’t we? No? Shoot, I was hoping you knew what that meant.
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