Coca-Cola hacked by Chinese and kept it a secret
"I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company"... it's the real thing, according to an old musical slogan, and it was the real thing when Coca-Cola was targeted by Chinese hackers in 2009. Once upon a time, Coca-Cola wanted "perfect harmony" and even cokes for everyone in the world, including polar bears and penguins, but that meant sharing soft drinks and not company secrets. After China infiltrated Coca-Cola systems, the company kept it a secret instead of singing about the breach to the world, according to a Bloomberg report.
In 2009, the FBI told Coca-Cola executives that hackers had broken into their computer systems and spent a month "pilfering sensitive files" about Coke's "attempted $2.4 billion acquisition of China Huiyuan Juice Group," Bloomberg reported. The Chinese hackers penetrated the network when the deputy president of Coca-Cola's Pacific Group, Paul Etchells, clicked on a malicious link in a targeted email.
The subject line on the email was "Save power is save money! (from CEO)," but after Etchell clicked the link supposedly from the chief executive officer, "malware was surreptitiously loaded onto his machine." It gave "hackers full access to Etchells's computer via the Internet, according to the internal report. They installed a keystroke logger, which captured everything the executive typed. Once in control of the computer, the hackers installed various other programs, gaining access to the company's corporate network and using Etchells's machine as a staging point to store and download data taken from other computers."
