Chinese Hackers Used G20 Summit to Spy on European Leaders
In August, as members of the G20 were preparing to meet to discuss exactly what could be done to address Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons attack in Syria, a mysterious group of Chinese hackers spied on the computers of five European foreign ministers, using the G20 summit as bait to hack them.
The cyber espionage operation was narrowly targeted and used phishing emails with malicious attachments that had titles referring to the Syrian crisis, such as "US_military_options_in_Syria," according to computer security firm FireEye, which uncovered the campaign.
The Syria-themed campaign, which hackers themselves dubbed "moviestar," was part of a larger espionage operation dating back to at least to 2010. The researchers at FireEye are calling the hacker group "Ke3chang," and they believe it is still active. The researchers are going as far as to say that the hackers are Chinese, although it's unclear whether they have ties to the Chinese government.
