2011/08/10

Large scale hacks to Tsai's office appears to come from China and Ma government

The computers in the Tsai Ing-wen's campaign headquarters were found to be hacked last Saturday.

The report (in Chinese) says that the hacks are in the form of Trojan horse, aiming at info stealing but not destruction. The headquarter was not aware of it until a "falsified Chairperson's schedule" was circulated among the headquarter personnel. The person responsible for the circulation had no idea where it was from.

Tsai is both the president candidate and the chairperson of DPP's. Her office holds all the info regarding how the DPP had planned and is planning to campaign for the president and legislator elections early next year, including how to deploy the resources, who is gonna take charge of what, etc.

All these info were stolen, alone with critical private info like user names, passwords, etc, of the headquarter personnel's.

The report didn't mention how long the stealing had been going on. A Trojan horse type of hack usually stays in the victim computer for a long time while gathering info. It's likely that the DPP has been operating like an open book for a long time in the eyes of her opponents.

The DPP had the ip's traced, and found that the hacks came from 3 sources:

1. China's national Xinhua News Agency (XNA);
2. Individual hackers;
3. Some "special group" inside Taiwan;

The XNA denied any involvement. But the investigation reveals attacks came from the XNA in Beijing and going through the XNA branch in Malaysia.

The 3rd group is revealed to be from the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, an office in Executive Yuan (RDEC, 行政院研考會) of the Ma Ying-jeou government.

There's no comment from Ma government so far. The DPP said they don't want to speculate anything now.

They do complain about the reluctance of the police in pursuing this case. A police office was quoted as saying, "don't pull the trigger only because you see a shadow," when he/she was asked to investigate.

This is not the first time the police plays dormant to threats against the DPP. Two Three months ago, a facebook user publicly call for assassinating Tsai. The police claimed they will investigate.

There were several online assassinating calls against Ma Ying-jeou in the past. Each of them was dealt with in a lightning pace --- whoever made that claim was caught by the police the same or the next day.

But when the target was Tsai, it's a different story. Two Three months from the date the police claims to investigate, the one calling for killing Tsai is still at large now. There's no sign if the police intends to catch this guy. Update: for the assassination call on the Facebook, the police says that they've asked the Facebook in USA to provide the user info but to no avail. They say they will keep trying.


8 comments:

阿牛 [10/8/11 04:27] said...

:-/ Scary. And just terrible news for the campaign effort.

Taiwan Echo [10/8/11 04:33] said...

Indeed. I'm sure this kind of scary things will go on and on, in different formats.

Ma? [11/8/11 23:50] said...

Scary are your claims without any proof (libel). You should get arrested. I'm gonna contact the right sources, you will hear from them.

Taiwan Echo [12/8/11 00:49] said...

@"Ma?",

Obviously you don't have enough intelligence to understand the term "appears to" means.

Taiwan Echo [12/8/11 01:04] said...

btw, Ma?, I guess you don't read Chinese news. It's all over the place. Contact your "right sources" and have them all arrested.

justrecently [12/8/11 16:19] said...

I'm gonna contact the right sources

Sounds familiar to me - must have been said countless times through history, most frequently by the usual blind power-worshippers.

Anonymous [17/8/11 10:43] said...

Why didn't you also mention in your post that Ma's election office experienced hacks in the same series of attacks?

Placing blame on the KMT is quite stupid if their own offices were hacked as well. Hmm, possibly while the KMT were busy hacking the DPP, the DPP were doing the same in reverse. lol

Alex [26/9/11 17:06] said...

Hi,

Is there a way I can get in touch with you? Email, maybe?

Thanks,
Alexandria
alexandria.dee@gmail.com