China

Thursday Internet traffic dropped off substantially to and from China. Paul Mozur of the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time blog tracked the outage as a data dropoff lasting from 11:00am to 1:00pm local time.

The interruption spawned a host of possible explanations. These included the powerful 8.6 magnitude earthquake the day before off the coast of Indonesia, a cinching down of the "Great Firewall of China" censorship system, a failure in the country's network backbone, and a software upgrade.

Hacktivist group Anonymous reportedly plans to launch more attacks on Chinese government Web sites to "uncover corruption" and take down the "Great Firewall of China".

The group wanted to alert the Chinese government that they "aren't afraid", and were going to "show the truth" and "fight for justice", Anonymous hacker, f0ws3r, told Reuters in a report Monday.

China was struggling Thursday to restore several government websites that international hacking group Anonymous says it attacked in an apparent protest against Chinese Internet restrictions.

On a Twitter account established in late March, Anonymous China listed the websites it says it hacked over the last several days. They include government bureaus in several Chinese cities, including in Chengdu, a provincial capital in southwest China.

Trend Micro is reporting that websites of Indian government and Tibetan activists in India were attacked in a cyber attack campaign by a Chinese hacker, working with one of the world's largest online retailers Tencent. 

Known as the Luckycat cyber campaign, about 90 attacks were detected in recent past, against targets in India and Japan, as also Tibetan activists, according to the report released Trend. 

Richard Clarke, a former cybersecurity and cyberterrorism advisor for the White House, was a U.S. government employee for 30 years: between 1973 and 2003. He worked during the times of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush. 

Clarke now wants to warn us, urgently, that we are being failed again, being left defenseless against a cyberattack that could bring down our nation’s entire electronic infrastructure, including the power grid, banking and telecommunications, and even our military command system.

Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, has criticised suggestions that Huawei is somehow involved in cyber warfare after the Chinese vendor was blocked from bidding for NBN work over security fears.

A report by China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team and Coordination Center claimed that cyber attacks on the country from foreign hackers has surged in 2011, rising to 8.9 million computers affected from 5 million the previous year. 

It said Japan was the source of most attacks at 22.8 percent, followed closely by the United States, 20.4 percent, and the Republic of Korea, 7.1 percent.  The report also found that 11,851 Internet protocol addresses based overseas had controlled 10,593 Chinese websites last year. 

Chinese telecommunications company ZTE has demonstrated an optical fiber network transmitting at a blazing 1.7TBs! 

The network which uses Wavelength Division Mutiplexing separtes data into different wavelengths and transmits them over the same optical fiber. In the demonstration, ZTE made use of 8 different channels, each transmitting at 216.4Gbps and covered a distance of 1,087 miles over standard optical cables. 

Don't hope of this coming to an ISP near you within the next 5 years though. 

The race is on to develop a working exploit for MS-12-020 - A serious vulnerability in Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol which was patched earlier this week.

The vulnerability affects all current versions of Windows (though the service is usually disabled by default and there are other methods of mitigating the risk). While Microsoft originally predicted that it would take approximately 30 days for an exploit to surface, it appears that the timeframe may be cut shorter. Much shorter.