Security News > 2011 > February > Chinese Spies May Have Tried to Impersonate Journalist Bruce Stokes

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticles/people/capitalcomment/18158.html By Shane Harris Capital Comment Blog Washingtonian 01/28/2011 While the candid characterizations of foreign leaders by diplomats (“thin-skinned” Nicolas Sarkozy,“corrupt” Vladimir Putin) have received much of the attention from the recent WikiLeaks document dump, hidden in the flood of cables are behind-the-scenes dramas involving Washington power players. National Journal’s Bruce Stokes learned in the documents that, while he was the magazine’s international-economics correspondent, he was unknowingly the central character in an apparent Chinese espionage plot. In 2009, five State Department employees who were negotiating with China on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions evidently received e-mails bearing Stokes’s name and contact information. The subject line of his purported messages -- “China and Climate Change” -- was germane and innocuous enough to pass as a journalist’s query. For good measure, Stokes’s cyber-imitator included comments in the e-mails related to the recipients’ jobs, according to a State Department cable documenting the incident. The e-mails, though, weren’t from the offices of National Journal. Instead they were a ruse known as “spear phishing,” in which the sender imitates someone the recipients may know, luring them to open the message and any attach-mints, which usually contain a computer virus. Stokes was a well-thought-out target: He has connections to the diplomatic corps -- including his wife, Wendy Sherman, the Clinton administration’s policy coordinator on North Korea and now a principal at the Albright Stonebridge Group -- and he has known the US climate-change envoy, Todd Stern, for years. [...]

News URL

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticles/people/capitalcomment/18158.html