google hack

U.S. authorities have tracked down the man who wrote the code used in the hacker attack on Google. He's a "freelance security consultant" in China, and his participation makes it even harder for the Chinese government to deny involvement. The man's role was an oblique one: while he wrote the code that took advantage of a security hole in Internet Explorer, he himself didn't do any actual hacking.

Two Chinese schools with links to the armed forces have become implicated as suspects in the ongoing Operations Aurora attacks against Google and at least 33 other western conglomerates last December.

Security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, now reckon the attacks date from April last year, far earlier than previously suspected, the New York Times reports. Although the attacks originated from China, it's by no means clear that they were orchestrated by the Chinese government. It's even possible that hackers from outside China ran, or had an involvement in, at least some of the attacks.

The recent incident at Google shook the entire world, but was it merely a one-off incident or a wake-up call? Did the event gather importance just because Google threatened to pull out of China or stop the so called censorship or was there something more sinister? I tried to explore a little.