Hacked Chamber of Commerce Opposed Cybersecurity Law

The United States Chamber of Commerce has confirmed Chinese hackers last year broke into internal networks.
The breach is, in some ways, a twist of fate for the Chamber. It has been one of the more vocal critics of cybersecurity legislation. In an internal draft document circulated earlier this year, the Chamber criticized the White House’s legislative proposals on cybersecurity as “regulatory overreach” and cautioned that “layering new regulations on critical infrastructure will harm public-private partnerships.”
“This happens all the time,” says Tom Kellermann, chief technology officer at AirPatrol Corp. and a member of President Barack Obama’s commission on cyber security. “This is essentially the modus operandi of China’s economic espionage campaign. Hackers use a trade group as a beachhead to compromise the constituency. What intellectual property does the Chamber have? They don’t. But they’re trusted.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was the first to alert the business lobbying group that servers in China were accessing the Chamber’s internal network early last year. A subsequent internal investigation found the hackers had zeroed in on four of the lobbying group’s Asia policy experts and that at least six week’s worth of e-mails had been pilfered. The Chamber shut down the operation in May 2010.

Read more at: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/hacked-chamber-of-commerce-opposed-cybersecurity-law/