The Google-China relationship has been the subject of many recentarticles and debates in the media. Across the globe, thousands have protestedagainst Google, claiming that the renowned web browser is lending a hand to thetrampling of human rights in China by allowing the Chinese government to filtersearch results.

Last Tuesday Google announced that it was consideringexiting the Chinese market as the result of a sophisticated online attacktargeted at Google systems – especially Gmail – in order to penetrate the accounts of pro-democracy activists in China.

In the beginning, the assumption was that the hackers(reported by some as being funded by the Chinese government), used a zero-dayAdobe Acrobat Reader vulnerability. However, according to McAfee, there is evidencethat they used a new IE zero-day vulnerability instead.
More information about the IE zero-day vulnerability can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/979352.mspx

Link to the Adobe blog post referring the attack:
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/adobe_investigates_corporate_n.html

It will be interesting to see if Google will carry out itsthreat to leave the Chinese market. My bet is that it won’t.

In the meantime, it is important to note that eSafe customers are protected against both exploits – the Adobe Acrobat exploit and the new IE zero-day exploit.