Sven Welzel — Der Blog

Tag: operation aurora

  • Google.cn relocated to Hong Kong

    Well, as I said in the previous posting on this matter, Google decided to ‘close’ operations in China – to relocate to Hong Kong as www.google.com.hk.

    In addition, there is no self-censorship in place anymore – anything goes, according to reports.

    The Chinese Government is ‘disgusted’ at these developments and reiterated that foreign firms need to stick to Chinese law in China – which includes the censorship which has been used as the football in this situation (seeing that the actual reason for the bruhaha is Operation Aurora).

    Google had a 35% market share of the search engine market in China – and now leaves a gaping hole in the online search/advertising space. So, is bing.cn next?

  • An update on Operation Aurora

    The attack (Operation Aurora) on around 20 companies in the US, including Google, Adobe, Juniper Networks and others using the zero-day exploit of Internet Explorer is partly linked to social engineering — as the carefully crafted emails were plausibly created and structured, users bought into it. Once the machine was owned after the payload was released, the affected machine would contact a Command and Control (C&C) server that would send back specific instructions based on Workgroup name and machine environment (OS etc), accepting and transmitting data via a home-made encryption based piggy-backed onto the 443 port — typically reserved for the HTTP SSL transfer of data. (more…)