Hacked Yahoo email accounts in China and Taiwan

Yahoo email accounts of several journalists and human activists have been hacked and their contents likely downloaded in what seems like an organized attack concentrated on gaining as much intelligence as possible regarding activities that those people might be engaged in and that the Chinese government finds objectionable or threatening to social stability.

Among the owners of the hacked accounts are Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist; Andrew Jacobs, reporter for the New York Times in Beijing; and Dilxat Raxit, spokesmen of World Uyghur Congress, a group that supports the idea of separatism among the ethnic Uighurs.

The accounts were inaccessible for several days, and Raxit says that that he couldn’t access his for a whole month. Jacobs says that he discovered that his account was set to forward his emails to an unknown account – without his knowledge, of course.

Reuters reports that Yahoo made a statement in which claims it is going to investigate the matter and that it “condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose”. It was speculated that the company was among the ones that were breached by the Aurora attacks in January, but it was never actually confirmed by Yahoo itself.