Communications of the ACM
I Was Hacked in Beijing
Photographs by Jim Wehtje/Photodisc Getty Images, and Stephen Shaver, via Bloomberg News
The reality--and my fears--dawned only slowly.
For weeks, friends and colleagues complained I had not answered their e-mail messages. I swore I had not received them.
My e-mail program began crashing almost daily. But only when all my contacts disappeared for the second time did suspicion push me to act.
I dug deep inside my Yahoo settings, and I shuddered. Incoming messages had been forwarding to an unfamiliar e-mail address, one presumably typed in by intruders who had gained access to my account.
I’d been hacked.
That phrase has been popping up a lot lately on Web chats and at dinner parties in China, where scores of foreign reporters have discovered intrusions into their e-mail accounts.
But unlike malware that trawls for bank account passwords or phishing gambits that peddle lonely and sexually adventurous Russian women, these cyberattacks appear inspired by good old-fashioned espionage.
From The New York Times
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