Chinese infiltration has permeated in a much greater proporation then imagined.

@Shehzadi, I totally agree with your opinion. I think Chinese are moving forward at an accelerated pace partly aided by American technology gained through hacking. I think international community should come together to fight against this countries induldged in such practices.

I personally believe that wikileaks should have been eye opener for everyone. The enormous number of cable leaks are enough for cyber security experts to give them sleepless nights . Maria has raised a very pertinent point that its just tip of the iceberg. Chinese infiltration has permeated in a much greater proporation then imagined. I think its a more worrisome factor for those companies which are entrusted with sensistive data...where secrecy and finances are involved. Hacking of media newspaper would not do much harm as compared to the organziations whose data if stolen could inflict a telling blow on national and international front. 

I am shocked that the Times would have any secrets.  Publish 'em!

If the Times was hacked, just how many other news firms would be of interest to China, or for that matter any government.  I'm not so sure we can lay blame entirely on Chinese hacking of large outfits either.

There could be wholesale attacks going on that don't make the news, or maybe haven't yet been discovered by the affected sites.

And then what if it's not the Chinese government but an exercise by our very own spy agencies? The plot could be much thinker than we might imagine.

I pray we never see the day this happens, that said i see a lot of local government agencies running freeware or other low cost systems with very limited security and very little expertise in the IT department in security. I was recently speaking to the state government of a state that shall remain nameless who said they usually hire inexperienced folks in IT and train them on the job. when asked the credentials of the most senior security person they responded with he used to be a hacker but has no formal education. Now I am all for on the job training and the hiring of trainees but I confess this scared me a bit

Oops... well, I wasn't going to see it either way, but thanks for the correction, Mitch! How about a movie that tells the tale of zombie hackers?

Alison, I think World War Z is about zombies. I know that PCs that have been infected by worms are sometimes referred to as "zombies," but I think this movie is about the OTHER kind of zombie. 

Braaaaaaains.

I hate to say it, but I wonder if China is overestimating the strategic significance of the New York Times?

Yes, if the attackers are the same as were used by the Chinese military in the past, and they used the same resources and servers, that would be strong circumstantial evidence. 

OTOH, the hackers could be operating on their own this time, and of course the same people would use the same tools. 

Mitch --

The evidence seems to be circumstantial, the investigators said.

From the NY Times article:

...

The pattern that Mandiant's experts detected closely matched the pattern of earlier attacks traced to China. After Google was attacked in 2010 and the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were opened, for example...

Security experts say that by routing attacks through servers in other countries and outsourcing attacks to skilled hackers, the Chinese military maintains plausible deniability.

"If you look at each attack in isolation, you can't say, 'This is the Chinese military,' " said Richard Bejtlich, Mandiant's chief security officer.

But when the techniques and patterns of the hackers are similar, it is a sign that the hackers are the same or affiliated.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/chinese-hackers-infiltrate-new-york-times-computers.html?pagewanted=all