According to Canadian researchers, a cyber spy network which is based mainly in China hacked into different government and private organizations. The hacking involved classified data from organizations of 103 countries and even includes systems of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exiles.

The Information Warfare Monitor, the research group mentioned here, initially researched on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community in exile, but later it found out a wider network of compromised machines.

What the researchers told -

“We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama,” investigator Greg Walton said.

According to the research group, the analysis finds China to be the main source of the network. However the main reason for hacking and the identity of the hackers are not yet ascertained.

Information Warfare Monitor (IWM) consists of researchers from SecDev Group and the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. The group detected this cyber espionage network of over 1,295 affected computers. The affected computers belong to ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Barbados Bangladesh, Indonesia, Latvia, Brunei, Philippines, and Bhutan. The cyber espionage network also included computers of the embassies of India, Indonesia, Cyprus, South Korea, Romania, Thailand, Malta, Taiwan, Germany, Portugal, and Pakistan.

The hackers infiltrated the affected systems and then using malware took control of the systems so as to get data from the computers and send and receive data. In the abstract of the to be submitted report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement,” Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson mentions that even though these malware attacks are not new but the ability of such malware to collect intelligence information for use by the government, police  and security agencies is really shocking.

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