Spies hack Dalai Lama’s office

Some sus­pi­cious activ­ity on the com­put­ers at the pri­vate office of the Dalai Lama leads to the dis­cov­ery of an inter­na­tional com­puter spy ring

A group of intre­pid researchers at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto recently dis­cov­ered the exis­tence of a vast com­puter spy­ing oper­a­tion that has seri­ous impli­ca­tions for global secu­rity. The researchers dis­cov­ered that the sys­tem was being con­trolled from com­put­ers based almost exclu­sively in China, how­ever China’s Foriegn Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang (pro­nounced Chin Gang) was quick to dis­miss the research find­ings as “lies.” The spy net­work dubbed “Ghostnet” has infil­trated over 1,000 com­put­ers in 103 coun­tries and has stolen doc­u­ments from hun­dreds of gov­ern­ment and pri­vate offices around the world. But it all began at the office of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India.

Rebecca Novick spoke to one of those researchers, Greg Walton, a Security Development Senior Fellow at the Munk Center, who was invited by the pri­vate office of the Dalai Lama to look into sus­pi­cious activ­ity on their com­puter net­work. Greg Walton is the senior secu­rity researcher for ONI Asia, and the first SecDev fel­low at the Citizen Lab. He is a grad­u­ate of the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford (International Relations and Security Studies), and holds an MSc from the Computer Science Department, University of Sunderland (UK). In the past Greg worked for a num­ber of human rights orga­ni­za­tions, and as a radio and TV jour­nal­ist in Asia. He is the author of a sem­i­nal study ana­lyz­ing China’s cen­sor­ship and sur­veil­lance sys­tems and the com­plic­ity of west­ern cor­po­ra­tions (Golden Shield). In addi­tion to his work for ONI Asia, Greg is also the edi­tor of ONI’s sis­ter project, the Information Warfare Monitor and the Chief Security Officer for the start-​​up Psiphon, head­ing up the “red cell” — responsible for pen­e­tra­tion test­ing and secu­rity analysis.