corporate espionage

The following article has been compiled by Bev Robb. Bev owns Teksquisite, a Southern Oregon IT Consulting business that specializes in Internet security technologies and social media. She is currently consulting with Virtual World Computing (VWC) on their flagship product Cocoon, a Firefox plug-in that protects Internet users from viruses, malware and online tracking.  She blogs at the Tekblog and the Cocoon blog and currently administers five Facebook fanpages.

Intel was targeted by "sophisticated" attacks last month, about the same time that Google reported its network had been breached, allegedly by Chinese hackers. In its annual report filed Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Intel confirmed that it had been hit in January.

"We regularly face attempts by others to gain unauthorized access through the Internet to our information technology systems by, for example, masquerading as authorized users or surreptitious introduction of software," read the 10-K filing.

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.

The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.