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.
Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.