January 8, 2008: Military intelligence
experts are pondering just what Chinese hackers want with the Pennsylvania
State government. On January 4th, a hacker was discovered to have gotten onto
the state government web site system. All state sites were shut down until the
damage could be assessed and taken care of. Turned out the hacker, who was
traced back to China, was trying to
plant a virus. This was believed to be just another attempt to plant a hidden
program that wound infect people using state government web sites. But four
different state department sites were attacked. So it was either a massive
attack, a coincidence, or something else.
Attacks on federal networks, traced
back to China, and definitely out to steal data, have been suffered with
increasing frequency over the last two years. For a major Cyber War attack on
the United States, state government would have to be hit, along with federal
networks. But this would be the first case of state sites being hacked for
this, if it was part of a Chinese Cyber War effort.
