Quirks in Tech

Hackers who breached Google database appeared to seek identities of Chinese spies in U.S. who might be under watch.

This story is incredibly significant: it clarifies an additional target of the Aurora attacks in 2009 (the database that Google stored FISA warrant information in) and, as an extension, provides a notion of why NSA was involved in the investigation (i.e. any revelation of FISA information constitutes a national security issue).

I suspect we’ll never get the full story of what all occurred, but this article very nicely supplements some of the stuff we learned in Levy’s book In the Plex, as well as popular reporting around the series of attacks on major Western companies that happened in late 2009. It also reveals the significant of meta-data/information: it wasn’t necessarily required for attackers to know what specifically waas being monitored to take action to protect agents; all that was needed was information that the surveillance was occurring for countermeasures to be deployed.