Security specialist ‘has evidence of Chinese attack on Google’
A US computer expert says he has found the ‘digital fingerprints’ of Chinese authors on the tools used to launch recent attacks against Google
Joe Stewart has identified an unusual algorithm in the code used in the Google attacks which he believe is clear evidence that the hack came from China Photo: GETTY 
Joe Stewart, a security specialist with SecureWorks in the US, told the New York Times that he had analysed the software used to attack Google, and found that the main program used by the hackers contained a module based on an algorithm that appeared in a Chinese technical document that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites.
Google last week announced that the accounts of human rights activists and political dissidents had been hacked, and that it believed the attacks had originated from China. However, details about the precise nature of the attacks were not revealed, although security experts broadly agreed that Google was probably correct in its suspicions.
Google China hacks ‘a possible inside job’ It is thought that a Trojan virus, known as Hydraq, was responsible for opening a “back door” in to compromised computers, which could then be used by hackers to access and take control of a machine without the owner’s permission or knowledge.
Stewart uses a method known as a “reverse engineering” to unravel malicious software, viruses and Trojans to identify how and where they originated. He looks for patterns in the code, and for unusual algorithms used by hackers to error-check transmitted data.
However, Stewart said that he could not rule out the possibility that the programmers behind the Google hack had laid a false trail that pointed to Chinese involvement in order to disguise the fact they originated from another country or government.
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