China

Another day, another cyberespionage campaign attributed to a Chinese hacking group. Today's newly identified hacking push is a watering hole attack against Forbes and other targets last November that's been attributed by iSIGHT Partners and Invincea to likely be the handiwork of a long-running group they call Codoso Team, but which has also been named as Sunshop Group. The campaign was made possible by a zero-day attack that strung together a now-patched Adobe vulnerability with a bypass vulnerability in Microsoft's ASLR technology for Internet Explorer that the company patched today.

China has fined Qualcomm about US$975 million for engaging in monopolistic business practices, and the chipmaker has agreed to modify some of its business practices in the country as part of the settlement.

Qualcomm said it is disappointed by the results of the investigation, but will not contest the findings and will pay the fine.

Apple will allow China’s State Internet Information Office to run security audits on products the company sells in China in an effort to counter concerns that other governments are using its devices for surveillance, according to news reports.

Apple CEO Tim Cook agreed to the security inspections during a December meeting in the US with information office director Lu Wei, according to a story in the Beijing News.

Allegations that Chinese authorities hacked into Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Outlook email service are "groundless slander", the official Xinhua news agency quoted Beijing's cyberspace regulator as saying late on Thursday.

The comments, made by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) spokesman Jiang Jun, were in response to a Monday report by an online censorship watchdog which said that Chinese users of the email service were subject to a hacking attack over the weekend.

China now knows what most people in the west are catching up with: that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a lemon.

The latest round of managed information release by Edward Snowden via Spiegel includes the snippet that Chinese security services copied “terabytes” of data about the aircraft.

The release states that the compromised information includes radar systems data, engine schematics, heat contour maps, and designs to cool exhaust gases. The latest leak confirms the scale of the data theft, which emerged in US media such as The Washington Times March 2014.

China, which is no stranger to Internet censorship, is now blocking access to Gmail on an IP level for many of its 1.3 billion citizens.

Many of Google's services, including Gmail, have previously been blocked on a nationwide level in mainland China. In the past, censorship was mostly relegated to YouTube and Google's search engine, especially during periods leading up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4th, 1989 - but this is the first time Google's email service has been blocked in China entirely.

China may have the ability to remotely shut down computer systems of US power utilities, aviation networks and financial companies, according to director of the US National Security Agency Mike Rogers.

Testifying to the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on cyber threats, Rogers said digital attackers have been able to penetrate such systems and perform "reconnaissance" missions to determine how the networks are put together.

Chinese hackers have attacked the US weather satellite network, causing services to be sealed off for a period.

The US regularly accuses China of state sponsored assaults on its businesses, industries and utilities.

The US is currently talking of a cooling in trade hostilities that would ensure the smooth passage of technology sales, but the cyber attack allegations still keep coming. The Washington Post reported that the weather satellite attacks happened in September, but were not revealed until late October.

With the maturity of China's quantum information science and technology, an advanced network that is considered unhackable and will provide the most secure encryption technology is ready to commercialise in China, according to Pan Jianwei, a quantum scientist and professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

Peng Bo, deputy director of the National Internet Information Office (NIIO), said on Sunday that the department will soon launch specific norms to supervise mobile applications in China, according to a NetEase news report on Monday.

He stated that a lack of supervision on apps has left loopholes in the country's internet environment, and that regulating the internet under laws would play a fundamental role during the progress of the country's strive for the rule of law.