Chinese Hack Into White House Email Network

The White House computer network was hacked into by Chinese hackers on multiple occasions, and obtained e-mails between government officials, a senior US official told the Financial Times today.  On each occasion, the cyber attackers accessed the White House computer system for brief periods, allowing them enough time to steal information before US computer experts patched the system.

This report comes the day after Newsweekstated that the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyberattack this summer by an unknown "foreign entity," prompting a federal investigation. The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents. (Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.)

”We are getting very targeted Chinese attacks so it stretches credulity that these are not directed by government-related organizations,” said a U.S. official about the White House attack in the FT report.  The official said the Chinese cyber attacks had the hallmarks of the “grain of sands” approach taken by Chinese intelligence, which involves obtaining and pouring through lots of - often low-level - information to find a few nuggets.

Email is an ideal source of such low level information.  Often, there is not enough in a single message to be significant.  But, the quantity of the messages enables others to link information.