China-based hackers are targeting their own country too apart from the US, where they hacked the US office of Personnel Management and corporate espionage.
Recently in September, Apple’s security was at stake due to an imitation copy of its XCode software development tool was shared in a file sharing site. As it was a counterfeit tool, many iPhone apps were attacked by virus and around 100 million iPhone users, majority of them from China, got affected by this.
Hackers didn’t leave NetEase at peace. All the security information of the users in the largest social media and news platform of china, where the security questions and answers and even passwords got hacked, in October. This time the hackers targeted 163.com which is the email system of NetEase which affected the data of hundreds of millions of Chinese users.
These hacks has raised an alarm among companies and individuals in China as per Hong Jia, a cofounder of the China-based threat intelligence firm ¬ThreatBook and former cybersecurity expert at Microsoft. All of them are aware that someday or other they will also be attacked. These hackings basically happen through local file sharing and games.
A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed alarming information that the average number of attacks over Chinese companies is 1245 against 241 the previous year. During Chinese New Year and other holidays a large number of hacks take place according to Ingvar Froiland, GM and Director of F Secure, which is a security company. Fraudulent Links when clicked downloads malwares, are targeted against individuals. Sometimes attacks are through games or other file sharing sites targeted within China. These happen apart from big hacks like the iPhone hack and NetEase hack.
There are a large group of hackers operating from a “hacking Village” which is a rural place and many such places are there along the China Vietnam border where many people are involved in the fraudulent activities like cybercrime, hacking, cyber fraud etc. They mostly use QQ by Tencent which is instant messaging software. Tencent is one of the most popular and biggest internet companies.
Liu Zhao, an anti-malware analyst ofTencent expressed that new tricks and trades are being used by Chinese hackers which are increasing in numbers. They use the technique of attaching malicious files masked behind harmless icons which are attached to files and mailed to individuals. These mail ids are stolen from various people across the community like parents, teachers, students and business owners.
Computer analysts across China are working hard to curtail these hacks. They are analyzing the traffic from the hacking village and similar places to understand how they are attacking websites and what kind of people are involved in this type of crime. Moreover Chinese are not aware of protecting their mobile phones with enough malware protection which has become another target for the hackers.
