Millions of Computers Hit by Virus Across China

Jakarta Globe, September 30, 2010

Bejing. A computer virus dubbed the world’s “first cyber superweapon” and which may have been designed to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities has found a new target — China.

The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week.

Stuxnet is feared by experts around the globe as it can break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves.

It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction.

The virus targets control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens that are commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.

“This malware is specially designed to sabotage plants and damage industrial systems, instead of stealing personal data,” an engineer at antivirus service provider Rising International Software said.

“Once Stuxnet successfully penetrates factory computers in China, those industries may collapse, which would damage China’s national security.”

Another unnamed expert at Rising International said the attacks had so far infected more than six million individual accounts and nearly 1,000 corporate accounts around the country, Xinhua state news agency reported.

The Stuxnet computer worm — a piece of malicious software, or malware, which copies itself and sends itself on to other computers in a network — was first publicly identified in June.

It was first found lurking on Siemens systems in India and Indonesia, but the heaviest infiltration appears to be in Iran, according to software security firms.

Yu Xiaoqiu, an analyst with the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center, played down the threat.

“New viruses are common nowadays,” he said. “Both personal Internet surfers and Chinese pillar companies don’t need to worry about it at all. They should be alert but not too afraid of it.”

A top US cybersecurity official said last week that the country was analyzing the computer worm but did not know who was behind it or its purpose. 

Agence France-Presse

Asians Muscling Into Social Media World

Jakarta Globe, Philip Lim | September 26, 2010

Singapore. Asians are muscling their way into traditionally Western-dominated social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Internet blogs, prompting major players to sit up and take notice.

Asians are embracing social media networks such
 as Facebook, as seen in this file photo, Twitter and
 blogs, with the potential to create a huge market
 in online advertising. (AFP Photo)   

With more than 220 million bloggers in China alone and nearly three out of five people in Singapore having a Facebook account, Asia is presenting a huge commercial opportunity for online advertising.

Social media guru Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of Ogilvy Public Relations' global social media team, said regional users were jumping on the social media bandwagon at a faster rate than the rest of the world.

"Asia is ... the most exciting part of the world for what's going on in social media," he said on the sidelines of a social media forum in Singapore.

Facebook launched an Asian sales office in Singapore this month in order to to be better placed to sell ads to companies aiming for the region's consumers.

"The Asian market's a very, very big market for us," said Blake Chandlee, Facebook's commercial director for regions outside North America and western Europe. "It's an enormous opportunity for us."

Chandlee said Asia was the fastest-growing among Facebook's geographical markets, or "theaters", despite restrictions on access in China.

Crampton said the growing number of Asians connected to the Internet was a key driver behind the region's social media craze.

A report in July by research firm Nielsen said that "while the US pioneered much of the early Web 2.0 and social media innovation, Asia is playing no small role in shaping -- and in some cases leading -- the new social media landscape."

The report added that "Asian social media adoption rates have surpassed Western adoption rates".

As of December 2009, China had 221 million bloggers or more than twice the number in the United States, it added.

Crampton noted that Facebook's ranking of leading markets showed Indonesia was already a close third behind the United States and Britain in monthly active subscribers -- and poised to take second spot within months.

Facebook refuses to give regional or country breakdowns, saying only that it has more than 500 million users worldwide.

Data from market research firm Inside Network estimated that monthly active Asia-Pacific users of Facebook numbered 117 million, or more than 20 percent of the global figure.

In June this year Asians also "tweeted" the most on micro-blogging platform Twitter, outpacing the United States, according to data from Internet research company Semiocast.

"Twitter users in Asia, mainly located in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, account for 37 percent of tweets," said Semiocast, which studied 2.9 million tweets over a period of 24 hours on June 22.

It said US-generated tweets now account for only 25 percent of messages on Twitter, down from 30 percent in March.

Asia-Pacific users are also creating social media content "to an extent that is unheard of almost anywhere in the world," Crampton added.

Data from research firm Forrester showed Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and Australians creating video, music and text content for social media at a much higher rate than Americans did last year.

And despite China's ban on Facebook and Twitter, the nation still boasts the largest number of social media users in any country thanks to locally-developed substitutes, the Hong Kong-based Crampton said.

"What has happened as a result is that domestic players have arrived, and these domestic players are the rough equivalents of what is happening internationally," he added.

He cited Chinese video-sharing website YouKu and social networking site Qzone as "being one hundred percent replacements" for foreign sites such as YouTube and Facebook. 

Agence France-Presse

Tools to visualize access to information

Google Blog, 9/20/2010 11:59:00 PM

When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we can’t serve our users effectively. That’s why we act every day to maximize free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Like all companies, Google’s services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. Our new traffic tracking tool helps us and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. Graphs are updated as data is collected, then normalized and scaled in units of 0 to 100. This new tool—which is global and includes China—will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualize disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. For example, the graphs show that YouTube has been inaccessible in Iran since June 12, 2009, following the disputed presidential election.

In April we also created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. Today we’re updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. We’ve also updated our analysis of the trends we saw across the data over the past six months. The new data for 2010 now includes the number of individual items asked to be removed, per country (for example, there may be many URLs per a single request.) You can learn more about trends in the data here. We view this as a concrete step that, we hope, will encourage both companies and governments to be similarly transparent.

Free expression is one of our core values. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. Free expression is, of course, also at the heart of Google’s business. Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information across the globe. We hope this step toward greater transparency—and these tools—will help in ongoing discussions about the free flow of information.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer