China had been accused of being the reason behind the Microsoft Outlook cyber-attack and had strongly denied the accusation. The information that China was to be blamed for the attack came from the anti-censorship group known as GreatFire.org. China had eventually accused the group of slander for alleging that the county could be behind the attack.
According to the group, Microsoft Outlook had suffered from a "man-in-the-middle" type of attack in China on Saturday. The attack was later on confirmed by the tech company which stated that some of its customers had experienced being routed to a server that seemed to copy Outlook.com
GreatFire.org along with other security analysts had a reason to believe that Chinese authorities are most likely to be behind the attacks. The reason is based on the fact that in order to launch the attack, hackers would first have to gain access to China's state-owned Internet service.
Apart from keeping track of cyber-attacks in China, GreatFire.org is also known for its active campaign in undermining the country's system in online censorship. With this in mind, the group created functioning mirror sites to those internet services owned by foreign companies which had been blocked by China.
In response to the group's claim, China has denied any involvement in the attack which is something that they had done a number of times in the past when faced with accusations dealing with hacking attempts.
"The Chinese government is a staunch defender of the Internet's security, and resolutely opposes any form of cyber-attack," the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said. "This is unprovoked speculation, and purely amounts to disinformation and slander from anti-China forces based abroad."
GreatFire.org retaliated by questioning the Chinese authorities' lack of action to investigate the man-in-the-middle attacks.
"If CAC claims they are not responsible, how could someone get into the backbone of the Chinese Internet and implement nationwide attacks for six times over the course of two years without being noticed?" said by the group in an email.
The group added that all of their findings are supported by hard data which means that there's no way that their statement could be groundless.
The attack against Microsoft Outlook in China is so far the latest attack that was staged against a foreign owned company in the country. China has been known to have a record of an increasing number of attacks and blocks that are aimed at foreign owned Internet services. Interestingly, the country operates an online censorship mechanism known as the Great Firewall which is deemed to be the most sophisticated in the world.
