RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events China Views U.S. As Its Primary Enemy

Editors said hired security experts concluded Chinese hackers cracked the passwords of more than 50 e-mail accounts, including those of top reporters. The Times reported the attacks coincided with an investigation the paper did that found relatives of Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, had accumulated billions of dollars through their business dealings.

So our security team notified AT&T, which monitors our network full-time, to look out for unusual activity. And we notified them a day before the story published. And the day the story went online, AT&T got back to us and said that they had noticed that at least three of our computers were communicating with command-and-control servers that they knew had perpetrated attacks on other companies before and that they believed were being coordinated by the Chinese military.

The timing of the attacks with the investigation of the story gave us some sense, but they were very active in the week after we published the story, and especially on election night, on November 6, which led some of my editors to suspect or fear that they might do the worst, which would be take down our print or online publication systems.

But very soon, it was -- it became very clear what they were after. We hired Mandiant, who came in and looked at our systems, and it looks as if they spent two weeks once they initially got into our systems in September moving around our systems, until they finally found the domain controller that contains usernames and passwords for every single New York Times employee.

They took those passwords, they cracked them, and they got into 53 of our computers, which it looks like they really used as a launching path -- launching pad for the real target of their attacks, which were the e-mail correspondents of David Barbosa, our Shanghai bureau chief, and Jim Yardley, our Beijing bureau chief.

David is the one who wrote the investigation into Mr. Wen's relatives. And based on what the attackers took, it looks as if they were looking for the sources of David Barbosa's investigation.

What is ironic about that is, as David has said publicly, the sources for that investigation were not some Deep Throat. It was publicly available documents in China. So we could see the documents that these hackers were taking, and they were not sensitive by any means. There was no Deep Throat. And it was clear that they were after his e-mail correspondence pretty early on in the attacks.

Just in the last several hours, it's become known that CNN International, the external service of the CNN television network, and The Wall Street Journal were also victims of similar attacks.

And the United States government is now putting cyber-vulnerability on its intelligence estimates.

And it's amazing how broad a problem it's become. When we started doing these investigations years ago, it was primarily aerospace and defense sector. You could almost count on those sectors being targeted. Today, it would almost be easier to tell you which sectors aren't being targeted.

We see anything from energy in oil and gas, to clean technology, biofuels, law firms, and, of course, as we heard today, even media and entertainment, so very broad-based attacks.

Well, the Chinese-language edition was blocked the day that that story on Wen Jiabao's relatives went live. And it continues to be blocked in China. And now we have seen that we have been hacked as well. We would like to relaunch that site in China, but it's a process.

I don't think that this will deter us from doing the journalism we have always done. And I will say, I really credit The Times for letting this story be told. As Grady can probably tell you, there were hundreds of other organizations targeted by the same group that hit The New York Times. You just haven't heard about any of them.

So, this is the first time that we have been able to provide sort of a rare glimpse into what one of these attacks looks like.