Canadian finance ministries closed off from web after cyberspy hack China

Corporate Finance News

Chinese hackers were accused of looting of sensitive documents from the Canadian government, which requires two departments of the Internet as a response. CSC reports that the attacks, the first time in January, goes back to the computer networks of China - noted the important proviso that commitment systems in China could have been used by others to cover their tracks.

Attacks on computer networks of destination and the Department of Finance and the Ministry of Finance of Canada's key government departments of economics. Internet access and the department was limited to the discovery of the attacks last month. Involved in the attacks targeted spear-phishing attacks designed to mislead government officials to hand over passwords and the use of malware.

The pattern of the attack matches that GhostNet assault that penetrated 100 other governments around the world back in March 2010.

Information Warfare Monitor, the Canadian group that detected those attacks, was reportedly asked to run an audit of government systems by the Canadian Security Establishment (CSE), a little-known armed forces division that serves as Canada's signals intelligence agency. The audit revealed that the two Canadian economics ministries had been comprehensively compromised, a problem not uncovered at the time of the original Ghostnet investigation some months before.

Sources involved in the investigation spoke to CBC News under the proviso that they would remain anonymous. Quizzed by CBC, federal government spokespeople would only say that an "attempt to access" federal networks had been detected.

In June 2009, warned the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that cyber-attacks against government systems and the private sector were up sharply. China, later blamed for cyber attacks against companies targeted the least energy data on discoveries of oil and gas field which have been blamed by some on the government spying charges that the Chinese government has always rejected. Furthermore, Google last year publicly criticized China Operation Aurora attacks against him and other hi-tech companies.