Blog 5: They Hacked MEEE TOO!

“Computer hackers have become a fact of life in recent years,” says Marcus Mabry from the New York Times. Mabry has been covering this story for the past couple weeks when the Chinese were accused of hacking into The New York Times. This may have all began with the New York Times, but as we know from other articles they were not the only victims. When Mabry speaks with Nicole Perlroth, a New York Times reporter, she speaks on behalf of why other companies are just now reporting to the public that they too have been hacked and most importantly what do these companies have to gain in going public with this matter.

In the last few weeks Twitter, Facebook, even apple have spoken publically about being victims of Chinese hackers. What does Twitter, Facebook, etc. hope to achieve at this point? Perlroth admits that there are a few dynamic to the now immediately response from companies. We know that soon after The New York Times said they were hacked The Wall Street Journal rapidly followed. The same patterned was seen with Twitter when they claimed 250,000 of its user accounts had been ‘potential’ accessed and that they knew of other companies being hit as well. Then Facebook and Apple came forward and it becomes a question of whether these companies came forward to possibly gain something in the end. My first opinion of this was that these ‘other’ secondary companies heard of the hacks and went through their systems to verify whether or not they too had been hacked.

However, Perlroth is suspicious of this pattern saying, “…other companies are jumping into the fray because it’s better for them to announce in a crowd than it would be for them to announce sort of in some silence later on.” So is the only reason they are coming out about the issue is to save their butts later?

Mabry questions whether companies are trying to bury the news of the fact that there was an ‘avalanche’ of headlines from their competitors. Google was actual the first t come out in 2010 when they had suspicions of the Chinese hacking into their Google accounts, but also said they were not the only ones. In fact there were about 30 other companies who were attacked by the same group; HOWEVER, out of those 30 companies only 2 came forward to address the issue!

It’s nice to finally see companies stepping forward but is it too late? Perlroth claims that the reason for so much hesitation is because companies fear coming out may affect their stock prices, lawsuits, and whether they will look like amateurs or not. Even suspicion is drawn on whether this is the companies fault or their layers holding them back. Hopefully we will find out more next week.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/02/21/business/100000002077643/going-public-with-cyberattacks.html

Melanie Maldonado

3/1/2013

4:58 pm