Hi and welcome to malicious life in collaboration with cyberism. I'm Ran Levy. In 2009, Chinese state hackers breached Google.

They stall intellectual property and use Gmail access to target

individual political dissidents such as the artist I Wei Wei. We did a whole two episodes about this hack known as Operation Aurora.

We talked about Google's presence in China, why the government may have had an interest in making enemies of them and how they actually

managed to reach Google. But dozens of other major companies were also caught up in the same hack, Adobe, Symantec, Morgan Stanley,

Blackberry, and plenty more. Why then did we focus so much on one company?

Well, there's that saying, history is written by the victors.

In the case of Operation Aurora, history was written by Google. They were the first to disclose the story in a blog post on January 12, 2010.

Now usually, when companies disclose major breaches in a blog they do so with vague language

and platitudes.

Things like we are investigating and taking appropriate action and the security of our users is

paramount. Maybe you've read a few of those before. Google's blog on the other

hand did not mince words.

Quote these attacks and these on the other hand did not mince words.

quote these attacks and these surveillance they have uncovered

combined 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.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cen, and so over the next few weeks we'll be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law if at all.

We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cen and potentially our offices in China."

The news that Google would potentially shut down their operation in China in response to a data breach was massive.

Google would be giving up access to a market of over 1 billion people

...