The New E-spionage Threat

A previously undisclosed breach in the autumn of 2005 at the American Enterprise Institute—a conservative think tank whose former officials and corporate executive board members are closely connected to the Bush Administration—proved so nettlesome that the White House shut off aides’ access to the Web site for more than six months, says a cyber security specialist familiar with the incident. The Defense Dept. shut the door for even longer. Computer security investigators, one of whom spoke with BusinessWeek, identified the culprit: a few lines of Java script buried in AEI’s home page, www.aei.org, that activated as soon as someone visited the site. The script secretly redirected the user’s computer to another server that attempted to load malware. The malware, in turn, sent information from the visitor’s hard drive to a server in China. But the security specialist says cyber sleuths couldn’t get rid of the intruder. After each deletion, the furtive code would reappear. AEI says otherwise—except for a brief accidental recurrence caused by its own network personnel in August, 2007, the devious Java script did not return and was not difficult to eradicate.

Malware about sums up the entire AEI.