Information Warfare: Belgium Hunts Chinese Oil Bandits

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May 15,2008: Belgium is the latest country to alert its citizens of Cyber War attacks (or just criminal hacking attacks) coming out of China, and into Belgium. The most worrisome aspect of this are the targeted attacks against specific Belgian government officials, and key members of NATO and European Union (EU) in Brussels. The latter two organizations have their headquarters in Belgium. It was noted that some of these targeted attacks were further specialized in that they were looking for data on Belgian energy (usually oil) related projects in Africa. This sort of thing leaves investigators believing that the ultimate consumer of such information is the Chinese government. It's also possible that these are criminals stealing specific data for specific customers. That makes little difference to the victims, but is of interest to those trying to improve Internet security. You don't go after criminal hackers the same way to do a national Cyber War operation.

 

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