Thursday 13 June 2013

Why Chinese University of Hong Kong? Data centre, satellite station may be targets of cyber attacks

Several advanced academic and research facilities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong may have been targeted by foreign intelligence agencies for cyber attacks.

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Guanyu said...

Why Chinese University of Hong Kong? Data centre, satellite station may be targets of cyber attacks

Ernest Kao
13 June 2013

Several advanced academic and research facilities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong may have been targeted by foreign intelligence agencies for cyber attacks.

The Hong Kong Internet Exchange and the Satellite Remote Sensing Receiving Station are located on the sprawling Sha Tin campus and may have been highly valuable sources of information and data. No concrete evidence has emerged that either have been hacked.

In an exclusive Post interview, US whistle-blower Edward Snowden said the US National Security Agency had been hacking Hong Kong and Chinese servers for years, targeting institutions such as CUHK, public officials, businesses and students in the city.

Formed in the 1990s, the Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HKIX) is the city’s local point for exchanging intra-Hong Kong traffic without routing via the United States or overseas servers. It essentially connects all of the city’s Internet Access Providers to a single infrastructure.

The HKIX is jointly operated by the Information Technology Services Centre (ITSC) – a CUHK-affiliated entity– located at the Information Technology Services Centre on campus, and at a secondary site in Kwai Chung.
The exchange serves more than 100 organisations in Hong Kong including those from the academic fields and commercial enterprises, such as fixed-line telecommunications and mobile broadband service providers.

The SRSRS, located on the campus’ Fok Ying Tong Remote Sensing Science Building, could also have been targeted for sensitive satellite imagery and data.

The station captures and processes satellite-sourced remote sensing data, which is used in monitoring the environment and natural disasters in a 2,500-kilometre radius – an area that encompasses the whole of Hong Kong, Jilin province in northern China, the entire Korean Peninsula, southern Japan and northern Indonesia.

In a story that was published on the Post’s website on Wednesday night, Snowden revealed that the NSA’s controversial Prism programme could have extended to people and institutions in Hong Kong and mainland China.
He believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.