Chinese Hackers are Real, I Tell You...

... And they're planning to flood the world with cheap telephones.

Al sits close to the Head of IT -- a position that reflects his operational centrality, and the affection in which he is held. But he came to me with a puzzle about his Hotmail. It seemed that he'd managed to send himself, and all his contacts, an email advertising http://www.feixiangyu.com -- an electrical distributor.

Well, we looked at things like his spam folder, and whether it was just in fact a particularly artful non-delivery notice. But soon he had replies from his contacts congratulating him on his new business venture.....

Now the beauty of Hotmail is that it's easy to attribute. The X-Originating-IP header gives just that -- the IP address of the originating computer, which is the IP that Hotmail saw as the browser that "got" (GETed?) the send links. This one was 123.53.119.162 and Sam Spade plumps that in the middle of the Middle Kingdom. The ISP is Chinanet, and the PoP is Zhengzhou -- capital of Henan, a respectful distance from the Yellow River -- seven million people in a few square miles, and at least one dodgy marketing guy.

On the whole, I'd rather be hacked by Chinese shopkeepers than the Russian Mafia -- you're less likely to have your bank account emptied. I told Al to change his passwords, check his bank statement, and run an online AV check on his home PC. I sure hope that shows something, otherwise I'm going to have to wonder whether it happened on his office machine, and that's something I just don't want....