Taiwanese political parties victims of sustained Chinese hacking attacks

Taiwan's two main political parties have revealed that they have been the subject of prolonged hacking campaigns from IP addresses originating in China, in yet another sign of the growing number of state-level attacks being launched from the country.

The China Post reported on Wednesday that the Democratic Progressive Party and the ruling Kuomintang party had been hacked over a period of several months.

Presidential campaign schedules and other materials were harvested from party officials' emails, the report said, forcing the parties to set up information security workshops and revert to written or spoken messages.

Many of the hackers' IP addresses were traced back to China, while others included the Malaysian branch office of the Chinese Xinhua News Agency and, more surprisingly, the Taiwanese parliament's own Research, Development and Evaluation Commission.

The scale and duration of attacks led Democratic Progressive Party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen to brand them well organised and "state-level".

The latest revelations add more weight to the argument that the five-year cyber espionage campaign dubbed Operation Shady RAT by McAfee was carried out in collusion with the Chinese authorities.

The report pointed to three targets in Taiwan including one within the government and an electronics company.

What's clear from these latest findings is that the percentage of these intrusions which get found out and subsequently publicised is hugely outnumbered by those that remain covert.