This article was published on January 17, 2010

Law Firm Suing Chinese Government Gets Attacked By China


Law Firm Suing Chinese Government Gets Attacked By China

pla.armyA Los Angeles law firm is suing the Chinese government over an alleged spear phishing attack. The law firm, Gipson Hoffman & Pancione, is of interest because it represents CYBERsitter.

As you might recall, CYBERsitter claims that the Chinese Green Dam censorship software is nothing more than a repacking of their own code, and that the Chinese government knowingly infringed on their intellectual property.

As Green Dam was a Chinese governmental project, the firm was already suing the government for stealing CYBERsitter’s creation. Now the firm has its own fight to pick with China, though this one is probably of more interest as it perfectly epitomizes the widely-held belief that the Chinese government has nothing but disdain for what the rest of the world deems proper conflict resolution.

Chinese hackers targeting American companies are nothing new, but active attacks from the government to try and abate lawsuits definitely are a novelty. To be fair, it’s not like the Chinese government wants to let this case play out properly: CYBERsitter is after all suing for $2.2 billion.

It seems a fair bet that China is a bit red faced at the moment. How could they not be? Not only is their government under investigation for a plethora of cyber attacks on major companies such as Google, but it never even got a chance to deploy the Green Dam software. Despite the sale of upwards of 56 million copies, China has already more or less dropped the entire project.

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Not that that bothers us too much; we hated that software from the very start. More as it comes.

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