A Chinese Hacker's Identity Unmasked

China and the United States have traded accusations of hacking following reports that The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post were all infiltrated by allegedly Chinese intruders. Google’s Eric Schmidt blasts China for waging undeclared cyber war in a forthcoming book, while Rupert Murdoch—perhaps relieved to find one of his newspapers hacked, rather than hacking—has taken to Twitter to highlight alleged attacks. But conclusively tracing any intrusion back to its source is usually impossible, allowing all parties some measure of plausible deniability.

In one case that has unfolded over the past two years, however, a trail of reused email addresses and aliases led to the business website and personal QQ and Kaixin accounts of a teacher at the P.L.A.’s Information Engineering University. At Bloomberg Businessweek, Dune Lawrence and Michael Riley describe and build researchers Joe Stewart’s and Cyb3rsleuth’s investigations of suspected hacker Zhang Changhe.