Hacking attack on DPP a potential ‘Watergate’

The nature of the classified information retrieved by hackers targeting the DPP underscores the KMT’s fears of losing next year’s election, a security expert says

The recent hacking attacks targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials and senior staff at Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) presidential campaign office could be Taiwan’s version of the Watergate scandal, a former official in charge of electronic communications for the government has said.

The DPP last week announced that the e-mail accounts of senior officials and staff at Tsai’s office had been hacked into and that confidential information had been stolen. In a press release, the party said that an investigation had traced the attacks back to IP addresses from Xinhua news agency bureaus in Beijing and Malaysia, addresses in Australia, as well as the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) in Taipei.

Among those targeted was Alex Huang (黃重諺), deputy director of the party’s Policy Research Committee, who said he received between 10 and 20 e-mails a day that looked like they were written by colleagues, but that, once opened, would automatically install malware that monitors a user’s computer.

A former senior official who handled electronic communication security under former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration told the Taipei Times on condition of anonymity last week that the truly worrying aspect of the recent attacks was the domestic angle.

My article, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.