UPDATED 09:37 EDT / NOVEMBER 09 2013

Weekly Security Review: China and Google

Cyber-espionage is back on the agenda now that China’s army hackers have renewed their efforts to penetrate organizations in the U.S. and abroad, according to a newly published congressional report by Mandiant. The cybersecurity firm had previously charged China’s secretive PLA Unit 61398 with stealing hundreds of terabytes of data from government agencies, defense contractors and technology companies, among others.

The cat and mouse game between Mandiant and the Chinese military first hit the spotlight in February, when the company traced dozens of separate attacks to an innocuous white building in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The ensuing uproar has not deterred Unit 61396 from carrying out further attacks, this week’s report reveals, but merely prompted it to lay low for a few months until more sophisticated tools could be developed.

“From what we can tell, they are still stealing the same type of data from the same industries,” said Mandiant spokeswoman Susan Helmick in an interview with Reuters. “The focus appears to be the same but the methods and malware, they had to shift.”

While China is focusing on intellectual property, the NSA is busy gathering personal data from online services. The latest snooping revelations suggest that the spy agency is tapping Google’s private network as part of a program called MUSCULAR, which executive chairman Eric Schmidt deemed outrageous and potentially illegal in an interview on Monday.

Seeking to distract users from its alleged involvement in the PRISM program, Google has doubled down on account security in recent months. This week, the company added a password protection function to Chrome in an effort to prevent hackers from gaining unauthorized access to login credentials. The feature is already available on the Mac, but there’s still no official word on when it’s coming to Windows and Linux.


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