Google blog, January 12, 2010.

Quote, like many other well-known organizations,

we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis.

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure,

originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.

However, it soon became clear that while at first appeared to be solely a security incident, albeit a significant one, was something quite different. Hi, I'm Ran Levy and you're listening to Malicious Life in collaboration with

Cyberision. In our previous episode, we learned how hackers, probably associated with the Chinese

government exploited a zero-day bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to infiltrate Google's internal

network via a maliciously crafted link.

After establishing the probable attribution of Operation Aurora, we try to decipher the motive behind the attack.

One potential motive where Google's intentional or unintentional attempts at

bypassing the Chinese censorship which imposed strict limits on the company's culture of supporting free and open

information sharing. But as I hinted at the end of the last episode, this culture clash was only part of the picture.

News that Google was hacked would have been enough excitement for one day.

But it was another revelation later in the with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web

have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business

operations in China."

The Google. C.N project, a major step for the company just half a decade in the making, now looked

like it would be scrapped. Why such a harsh and dramatic response?

The reason began to unravel only hours after Google's post went live when Adobe revealed that they too

had been breached. Soon came the mudslide. Lockheed Martin, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Dow Chemical Morgan Stanley.

In total, 35 of America's largest companies had been linked to the same attack. So by this point two things

...