Romania arrests suspected hacker of Bush family emails

Bucharest/ San Francisco:  Romanian authorities have arrested a man they suspect of being the hacker "Guccifer," famous for breaking into the email accounts of former U.S. President George W. Bush's family and other prominent political and entertainment figures.

Romania's Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism said on its website on Wednesday that it had detained a suspect with the initials LML in the county of Arad, near the border with Hungary.

The agency said there was "reasonable suspicion" that throughout 2013, the suspect "repeatedly and illegally accessed, breaking security rules, email accounts belonging to public persons in Romania with the aim of getting electronic mail confidential data."

Police declined to give LML's full name. A Romanian prosecutor, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters that the suspect is believed to be the hacker known as Guccifer and The Small Fume.

Guccifer has said he used a variety of methods, including guessing the answers to security questions, to get access to customer accounts at Facebook, Comcast Corp, AOL Inc and other companies.

Romania's public radio Radio Romania identified the suspect as Marcel Lazar Lehel, who received a suspended sentence in 2012 after a hacking charge. Reuters could not independently verify the name.

Guccifer claimed a wide range of victims, including Romanian officials, and provided documents to support those claims to a U.S. website, The Smoking Gun.

The hacker shot to fame in February last year after he hacked into Bush family emails and posted artwork by George W. Bush, including self-portraits of the former president in the shower and bathtub.

Guccifer has claimed his other victims include Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker magazine; "Downton Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes; journalist Carl Bernstein; venture capitalist John Doerr, and MetLife Chief Executive Steven Kandarian. Guccifer also compromised many former U.S. military officials, including ex-Secretary of the Air Force George Roche.

Last year, Guccifer distributed emotional emails sent to former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from European Parliament member Corina Cretu, a Romanian, prompting Powell to deny that they had had an affair.

The statement from Romania's Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism made no mention of Guccifer's activities in the United States or other countries.

The agency noted it has cooperated with American officials. The U.S. Secret Service, which was working on the Guccifer case, declined to comment.

Web crash in China: great firewall suspected

Photo credit: AP

Beijing/Shangai:  Human error likely caused a glitch in China's Great Firewall that saw millions of Internet users ironically rerouted to the homepage of a U.S.-based company which helps people evade Beijing's web censorship, sources told Reuters.

Hundreds of millions of people attempting to visit China's most popular websites on Tuesday afternoon found themselves redirected to Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a company that sells anti-censorship web services tailored for Chinese users.

The official Xinhua news agency on Tuesday quoted experts as saying that the malfunction could have been the result of a hacking attack, and domestic media was full of speculation along those lines.

DIT is tied to the Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in China which has been blamed for past hacking attacks.

During a daily news briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said he had "noted" reports of Falun Gong involvement, but said he did not know who was responsible.

"I don't know who did this or where it came from, but what I want to point out is this reminds us once again that maintaining Internet security needs strengthened international cooperation. This again shows that China is a victim of hacking."

However, sources familiar with the Chinese government's web management operations told Reuters that a hacking attack was not to blame for the malfunction. They declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

They said the incident may have been the result of an engineering mistake made while making changes to the "Great Firewall" system the Communist Party uses to block websites it deems undesirable - such as the DIT site.

The state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said "the attack" on the country's Internet is under investigation, the official CCTV broadcaster wrote on its microblog on Wednesday.

MYSTERY OVER HOW IT HAPPENED

CNNIC earlier said in a microblog post that the outage, which lasted for several hours, was due to a malfunction in China's top-level domain name root servers.

These servers administer the country's Domain Name Service (DNS), which matches alphabetic domain names with a database of numeric IP addresses of computers hosting different websites, a sort of reference directory for the entire internet.

Instead of matching the names of popular Chinese websites with their proper IP addresses, Chinese DNS servers instead redirected users trying to access websites not ending with the ".cn" suffix to the IP address associated with DIT's homepage.

It was unclear why users were being directed to the DIT site specifically.

Independent tests showed that the source of the malfunction originated from within China, and specifically from the Great Firewall servers themselves.

"Our investigation shows very clearly that DNS exclusion happened at servers inside of China," said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Information in the U.S. and an expert on China's Internet controls.

"It all points to the Great Firewall, because that's where it can simultaneously influence DNS resolutions of all the different networks (in China). But how that happened or why that happened we're not sure. It's definitely not the Great Firewall's normal behaviour."

Checks by DIT suggested a similar root cause for the overwhelming amount of traffic trying to reach the site, said Bill Xia, DIT's founder and a member of the Falun Gong.

"For such a large scale attack just targeting users in China, it can only be done by the Great Firewall," Xia said.

"It's even clearer this is not an attack of all the Domain Name Servers in the world, but the same as the DNS hijacking technologies used by the Chinese government to block websites they don't want."

The outage, which began around 3:15 p.m. local time, redirected roughly 1 million requests per second to the DIT site, said Xia.

Chinese web service providers have struggled to overcome recurrent performance bottlenecks in the country's massive but often rickety data network. The need to continuously censor domestic content and block foreign websites only complicates the matter.

In addition to fending off hacking attacks, network providers face challenges finding experienced server administrators and dealing with government bureaucracies. Frequently, authorities have overlapping jurisdictions over different aspects of Internet services.