The physical sources of the online attacks that targeted Google, Yahoo, Adobe, and many other organizations have been fairly well pinpointed, according to a new report. The supposed starting points: computers at two Chinese schools - Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School. This information comes courtesy of John Markoff and David Barboza (along with their unnamed sources).This seems to have been determined with a high degree of certainty. Unfortunately, it remains unknown who was behind the attacks, and individuals, companies, and governments all remain under suspicion.
According to The New York Times, the first is home to one of the top computer science programs in China, whose superiority was witnessed a couple of weeks ago when they came first in the IBM-sponsored "Battle of the Brains", beating 102 other teams from around the world, including the US champions - the team from Stanford University.
The second is endorsed by the military, since it is one of the schools from which future army computer scientists are trained. It is also worth mentioning that this school's network is managed by company closely connected to China's most popular search engine Baidu.
And while the involvement of students of the vocational school is suspected to come from a particular computer science class led by a Ukrainian professor - on whose existence and/or activity the school has refused to comment, a professor teaching Web security at Jiaotong University admits he is not surprised at the news. "Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal,” he says.
Proving whether behind the intrusions are individuals that were only "experimenting" or were actually working under the orders of the Chinese government or military will be very difficult, if not impossible.
netizens left a footprint.