Yahoo! accounts in China hacked

Wednesday 31 March 2010 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

According to news reports on Wednesday, the webmail accounts of foreign journalists based in China and Taiwan have been hacked.

The BBC News website reported that the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) had confirmed eight cases of email attacks on Yahoo! accounts in recent weeks and that the organisation had criticised Yahoo! for not responding to its queries concerning the hacking incidents and for failing to reveal details of how the accounts were accessed.

The website of the FCCC, which is based in Beijing, is now unavailable, simply bearing the message "This account has been suspended".

Clifford Coonan, a reporter for the Irish Times, told the AFP news agency that he had received an error message when logging onto his Yahoo! account this week. "I don't know who's doing it, what happened," said Mr Coonan. "They (Yahoo!) haven't given any information, but it seems to be happening to journalists and academics in China, so that's why it's a little suspicious."

The Chinese government exercises strict control over Internet content - especially pornography and sensitive political material - and its censorship has come to be dubbed the 'Great Firewall of China'.

These latest events come just a matter of weeks after Google accused China of hacking the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, resulting in a high-profile spat with the Beijing government that culminated in Google scaling down its presence in China and redirecting search traffic to an uncensored site in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong operations have not been without their problems, however. Earlier this week, Google blamed Beijing for blocking its search service, although it admitted that it did not know if it was a technical issue or a deliberate act. The problem has now been resolved and a spokesman for Google said in a statement:

"Interestingly our search traffic in China is now back to normal - even though we have not made any changes at our end. We will continue to monitor what is going on."

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