Tibet Group 2012 Excell Hacking Attempt

Tibet Group 2012 Excell Hacking Attempt ---
tags: CyberAttacks  hacking, China incident

Daily Beast On February 23, 2012, an email was sent to the director of Tibet Group 1, an activist organization, addressed personally, and appeared to come from Mr. Cheng Li, a prominent China scholar based at the Brookings Institution. The email requested the assistance of Tibet Group 1 in verifying information on Tibetan self-immolations. The name and title provided in the email matched real details for Cheng Li provided on his Brookings Institute staff page. But the director noticed that the email was sent from a suspicious AOL account, and turned to  University of Toronto’s CitizenLab in 2012. CitizenLab experts. It was soon discovered that the account appeared to have been registered by the attackers for this specific attack. Attached to this email was an Excel spreadsheet with malware. The Chinese security services were thought to be behind it because the operation was very sophisticated.