The Google/China controversy has got a new chapter. The cyber attacks have been traced back to two Chinese schools.

As we reported in January Google practically declared war on the Chinese government after they discovered serious cyber attacks at their own servers. It seems the hackers were after both business information and information on Chinese dissidents.

Image: Chinese citizens thanked Google for standing up to Chinese censorship by laying down flowers and notes at the Google China offices. photo credit: myuibe

Needless to say, for the Chinese government to get access to the email accounts belonging to the democratic oppositions, would help them unravel the networks of these dissidents. It would be bad for human rights in China and it would be bad for every-one’s trust in Google. In short: It would be bad for business.

Google counter attacked. The company declared that they no longer will accept any form of censorship on Google search results in China. If the Chinese do not accept this, Google will leave the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on China to investigate the attack, turning the case into a battle of nations.

The cynic might observe that Google didn’t become the defender of freedom of speech it should have been before its own interests were threatened. We say: better late than never.

The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune report that the attacks have been traced back to a Chinese elite university, the Shanghai Jiatong University, and to the the Lanxiang Vocational School, one of them with close ties to the Chinese military.

Computer security experts, including investigators from the US National Security Agency, have found that the attacks might have started much earlier than Google has reported — maybe as early as in April 2009. The hackers used a previously unknown flaw in the Internet Explorer web browser to gain access to corporate servers.

The investigators suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school. The computer network of the school is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the largest search engine in China.

So is this the smoking gun Google needs to prove that the Chinese government orchestrated the attacks?

The gun is smoking, but this does not prove that the Chinese government pulled the trigger.

Some analysts believe the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. The fact that the hackers where looking for information on Chinese human rights activists may support this theory.

Others, however, speculate the schools are used for covering an intelligence operation run by another country (implicating China in the process) or criminals trying to steal intellectual property from US technology firms. They could have hijacked the IP addresses of the schools.