Hillary Clinton asks China to probe Google attacks

WASHINGTON - "In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all," warned US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she urged Beijing to look closely into the recent hacking attempts on Google's China division. The attacks had earlier led Google to threaten to pull out its entire operations in the country. "We look to Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the cyber intrusions... We also look for that investigation and its results to be transparent," Clinton said in a speech at the Newseum journalism museum in Washington on Thursday (Friday in the Philippines). Google had earlier detected what it called a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China". The company said that the attack primarily targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates. Google reacted strongly to the cyberattacks, but did not directly implicate the Chinese government. The search engine giant however announced that it would stop acceding to the government's request to censor local search results and even considered pulling the plug on its entire China division. Two days later, the Chinese government issued an official statement underscoring its commitment to maintaining a hold on online search results. "China welcomes international Internet enterprises to conduct business in China according to law," stressed foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. - GMANews.TV