Chinese hackers break into the New York Times, steal every employee’s password

The New York Times has reported that for the last four months Chinese hackers have been infiltrating its networks, broken into the email accounts of senior staff, stolen the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees.

According to the report, the first attack came in mid-September 2012 as the newspaper prepared to publish an investigation into the family of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao, who are said to have accumulated billions of dollars through business dealings.

Malware was planted on users’ computers which opened backdoors for the hackers to gain remote access to connected systems – including a domain controller that contained usernames and hashed passwords for all of the New York Times’ employees.

The hackers were said to have…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.