Adam Segal
Why China hacks the world
New York; and Wuzhen, China — The e-mails wouldn’t have struckanyone as unusual. The messages to employees at Boeing Co.’s offices in Orange County, Calif., where the aerospace giant works on the big C-17 military transport, looked like any of the hundreds of messages from colleagues and contacts flooding inboxes every day. But beginning in the winter of 2009, two Chinese hackers began sending malicious e-mails to Boeing employees disguised to look as if they came from familiar people. Even if one employee opened the mail and downloaded the attached file, it could give hackers a portal to secrets, corporate and US Department of Defense plans, engineering details, and potentially classified Pentagon files stored on Boeing networks. And that’s exactly what happened.
Over the next two years, hackers stole some 630,000 files from Boeing related to the C-17, the third most expensive plane that the Pentagon has ever developed, with research and development costs of $3.4 billion. They obtained detailed drawings; measurements of the wings and fuselage, and other parts; outlines of the pipeline and electric wiring systems; and flight test data – a gold mine for any criminal looking to sell information on the black market. But the hackers, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, already had a buyer: Su Bin, a Chinese national and aerospace professional living in Canada.
"Everything that India and France have discussed is to set the stage for decades of cooperation," French Ambassador Francois Richier said.
