Internet News

Another cyber attack in China

A new cyber attack has come to light in China – this time affecting Yahoo Mail.

The Foreign Correspondent's Club of China (FCCC) claims to have uncovered eight cases of email accounts being penetrated in recent weeks, reports AFP. These incidents all targeted Yahoo email accounts belonging to journalists in China and Taiwan. Additionally, it has been reported that several accounts were disabled by Yahoo on March 25th 2010.

Some of the hacks have been particularly intrusive. The organisation revealed that one Beijing journalist discovered every message he wrote was being sent on to an unknown forwarding address.

Questions for Yahoo

However, there is still a lack of information from official sources about the alleged hacks. The Foreign Correspondent's Club of China said: "Yahoo has not answered the FCCC's questions about the attacks, nor has it told individual mail users how the accounts were accessed."

Although Yahoo has refused to comment directly on the incidents, a spokesperson said that the company condemned cyber attacks "regardless of origin or purpose". He added: "We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach."

In January, Google senior vice president David Drummond said that his company had been the victim of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" thought to emanate from China. That prompted a review of its operations in the country, which led to a unilateral decision by Google to stop censoring Chinese search results earlier this month.