Beijing correspondent CLIFFORD COONANwas one of a dozen journalists affected by hacking this week
IN THE pantheon of annoying online messages, the line “We’ve detected an issue with your account” has to be one of the more unsettling ones. It’s the carefully couched phraseology that hints at something darker, that perhaps you are not as secure as you think. What issue? Too full? Too busy? Apparently, in this case, the message meant that there had been an attempt to hack my account. That’s a real issue.
When I logged on to my Yahoo account as normal on Tuesday morning, I discovered this message, which had been there for some time, and alarm bells started ringing. We foreign correspondents in China have been extremely sensitive about internet security since Google said it was leaving China over hack attacks on rights activists and censorship back in January.
Conversations with friends showed I was not alone, and it now looks like about a dozen journalists and analysts have been affected by a co-ordinated and highly sophisticated hacking campaign.
Several fellow journalists had received a similar message, and one had spent nearly a whole day arguing with Yahoo trying to get things sorted out. My wife (also a journalist) had a similar problem two months previously, while another colleague, engaged in a sensitive book project about Tibet, lost his Yahoo account entirely for three weeks.
A pattern seemed to be emerging, and the creeping paranoia was not helped by the fact that United States was spelt “Unites States” at the second reference in the message. Bad spelling is a classic sign of e-mail scams or efforts to install malware on a computer, and is often the only way you can tell that you are the subject of a scam.
So was this hacking the work of a Nigerian spam racket, a disgruntled Chechen hacker or a Chinese malware expert? I have no idea, and no way of knowing yet, but the timing of the attack, so close to the Google brouhaha, makes me suspicious.
Every foreign journalist has to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to find out the most basic information because the system of internet controls known as the Great Firewall of China means you cannot see anything the government does not want you to, including long-banned YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
As an accredited journalist you have freedom to move around to report and are never censored. Anyone can read the stories online, so there’s no need to monitor what you’re doing, although it seems like good practice to always presume you are under surveillance of some kind.
Regardless of whether this was an effort to hack into my account from within China or something different, this has not been a great week for China’s reputation as a place to do business. Four executives from the mining giant Rio Tinto were given hefty jail sentences for corruption and stealing secrets. Even though they confessed to taking bribes, the lack of transparency about why they were arrested, what happened in the court and on what grounds they were convicted has not covered the Chinese legal system in glory.
Then there is Google. Last week, Google began its slow retreat from the mainland market, redirecting its search engine to Hong Kong. Its decision to quit has caused widespread anger in China, and we’ve all been watching to see if the government decides to retaliate. An analyst colleague said that Yahoo had told him that somebody was trying to get hold of his registration information, and that his account had been frozen until they could clear up what happened.
The annoying online message said I should get in touch with Yahoo, which I did, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. Hopefully they can explain what this “issue” really is all about.