BEIJING - Yahoo e-mail accounts belonging to foreign journalists
appeared to have been hacked and Google's Chinese search engine was
intermittently blocked, the latest troubles in China's heavily
censored Internet market.
The Yahoo accounts of at least three journalists and an analyst became
inaccessible over the last few weeks. They were greeted with messages
saying, "We've detected an issue with your account" and were told to
contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the
four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it
was not clear if the other instances were related.
Sensitivity about Internet security has run high since Google
announced in January it might leave China after a series of
cyberattacks and complaints about censorship. Last week, Google made a
partial retreat, shutting down its mainland-based search engine and
redirecting those queries offshore, to the freer Chinese territory of
Hong Kong.
Analysts have been watching closely to see if China retaliates for
Google's high-profile departure from the mainland search engine
market.
Redirected queries appeared blocked
Many redirected queries appeared blocked Tuesday on the Hong
Kong-based search engine. Although searches for benign terms were met
with results on Chinese competitors such as Baidu.com and Soso.com, an
error page would pop up when the same terms were typed into
Google.com.hk.
Google initially blamed the trouble on an internal revision that
inserted some coding that the company thought had caused China's
automated censors to block material that normally wouldn't be
prohibited.
But Google backed off its original explanation within a few hours.
After further investigation, the company said it realized the changes
in its search settings had occurred a week ago without disrupting its
results in mainland China. That discovery led Google to conclude the
trouble stemmed from changes in China's "Great Firewall" -- the
nickname for the tools the government uses to block access to sites
deemed to be subversive or pornographic.
Without doing anything on its end, Google said its search traffic from
mainland China appeared to be flowing freely again early Wednesday
morning in Beijing.
"We will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being
this issue seems to be resolved," Google said.
Web searches weren't the only Google service bogging down in China.
The company reported that access to its mobile services in the country
were "partially blocked" this week after experiencing no issues last
week. Google didn't provide a reason for the mobile disruption.
It was not clear where problems with the Yahoo e-mail accounts
originated. All four people affected are professionally focused on
China and related issues. They said they had heard of other colleagues
having similar problems, including one journalist who lost his Yahoo
account entirely in January.
Clifford Coonan, China correspondent for The Independent and the Irish
Times newspapers, said he received the "issue with your account"
notice when he logged in Tuesday. Another reporter said she received
repeated error messages from Yahoo last month.
The Western analyst said he was locked out of his account for four or
five days, until he spoke with a Yahoo representative Monday who went
through the security questions and restarted it.
"He said somebody had hacked into my registration details," said the
analyst, who would not give his name, citing the sensitivity of the
issue. The analyst said he was concerned hackers may have also
accessed his inbox.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., issued a statement Tuesday
condemning all hacking attacks and vowing to "take appropriate action
in the event of any kind of breach."
Coonan wondered whether he was just part of a broad attack against
Yahoo's e-mail accounts, or if he had been specifically targeted.
"I'd just be interested to see if anyone in the business community or
outside of journalism and academia has had the same problem, then it
might be less sinister," he said. "It's obviously annoying but if it's
just journalists and academics, that's scary."
Associated Press Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco
contributed to this report.
(c) 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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