Students at an elite Chinese university who won an international “Battle of the Brains” contest may have been behind the cyberattacks on Google that escalated into a major diplomatic incident last month.
US computer security experts have traced some of the attacks to computers at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, which boasts one of China’s most competitive computer science programmes, and the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province, the New York Times reported today.
Both institutions said they did not know the US investigation had implicated their systems, but one is believed to have ties to the Chinese military while the other has in the past been linked to the successful hacking and disabling of the White House website.
When Google accused China last month of trying to steal its software and hacking into human rights activists’ email accounts the company threatened to pull out of the country unless Beijing stopped censoring the web content that Chinese users can access.
The scandal also triggered an investigation led by the US National Security Agency that led initially to servers in Taiwan.
Tracing the attacks farther back to computer networks on the Chinese mainland represents a technical breakthrough but leaves Washington no nearer to knowing whether Beijing was ultimately responsible.
“Students hacking into foreign websites is quite normal,” a professor at Jiaotong University told the newspaper, adding that the attacks could have been by “one or two geek students who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills”, or by an unknown third party who might have hijacked the university’s computers.
In 2001 a hacker from Jiaotong identified by US experts as Peng Yinan took down the White House website for more than two hours in an attack that bore similarities to others on Yahoo and the CNN website the previous year.
Last month, students from Jiaotong beat teams from top international universities including Stanford in a programming competition sponsored by IBM that guarantees winners jobs or internships with the company.
A spokesman for the Lanxiang Vocational School said his students were unlikely to have mounted the attacks on Google since they were merely “high school graduates”, but the school admitted sending a handful of graduates into the Chinese military each year.
Its location also corresponds with one of six geographical regions identified in a recent report by Northrop Grumman, the US arms maker, as a source of online attacks traced to the military.
