So it appears that the “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” has apparently impacted somewhere between 20 and 34 large companies; including Google.
The initial post from Google last night.
Then, just moments later, Adobe released a very similarly-worded announcement stating that they had also been a victim of an attack as well.
Then, sort of an update, from Google with some additional snippets of information:
There appears to be a lack of clarity as to how pervasive this attack really was. For instance, the post on Google’s blog last night states the number “20″. A Bloomberg.com post stated this morning that there were 34 companies involved. Either way, the number of companies involved is mind-boggling.
Some additional commentary:
Evgeny Morozov has a great post/analysis over on Foreign Policy. I am not so sure I can come to the same conclusion given that he presupposes that China’s reaction to Google’s statement will be to simply shut Google.cn off. It may not come down quite like that.
Robert McMillan from IDG had great coverage that was carried in multiple places, like this article on PCWorld.
But I think the most telling snippet out of all of this is the statement issued by Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, on the US Department of State website here. The reason I think this is the most telling is because the fact that the Secretary of State issues a statement basically saying to China “you’d better have a really really good explanation for this” is remarkable given the current state of the economic relationship between China and the US (I am going to refrain from providing my opinion on this). You don’t see something like this every day.
Finally, as a resource you might want to consider, Tim Mullen re-shared his informative article on how to block access to an entire country using Microsoft’s ISA server, on Full-Disclosure this afternoon.
