Chinese Company and Employee Deny Any Involvement in Hacking Attacks

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Chinese Company and Employee Deny Any Involvement in Hacking Attacks

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — Tencent, a Chinese Internet company, denied on Friday that one of its employees had been involved in a recent breach of computers belonging to Japanese and Indian companies, as well as Tibetan activists.

The company and the employee suggested that his identity might have been confused with someone else’s.

The company released a statement soon after Trend Micro, a computer security company with headquarters in Tokyo, released a report on Friday describing the breach. It was the result of a nearly yearlong effort to hack into computers and steal information from hundreds of companies and individuals in several countries, the report said.

The report never identified a hacker by name. But it linked the attacks to an alias used by a graduate of Sichuan University in western China who wrote several articles on computer hacking and defense. The researchers found the alias through its connection to an e-mail address and a QQ number, the Chinese equivalent of an instant messaging screen name.

The New York Times identified the owner of the alias as Gu Kaiyuan, based on online records of his writing. Mr. Gu is now an employee at Tencent, which offers social networking, instant messaging, online gaming and other online features.

On Thursday, when asked about the attacks, Mr. Gu said, “I have nothing to say.” On Friday, however, he denied involvement.