>>1 EVERYONE
China Mafia-Style Hack Attack Drives California Firm to Brink
Michael Riley
November 27, 2012, 6:01 PM EST
During his civil lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China, Brian Milburn says he never once saw one of the country’s lawyers. He read no court documents from China’s attorneys because they filed none. The voluminous case record at the U.S. District courthouse in Santa Ana contains a single communication from China: a curt letter to the U.S. State Department, urging that the suit be dismissed.
That doesn’t mean Milburn’s adversary had no contact with him.
For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software Inc., Milburn’s family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company’s parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national Internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a $2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April.
In between, the hackers assailed Solid Oak’s computer systems, shutting down web and e-mail servers, spying on an employee with her webcam, and gaining access to sensitive files in a battle that caused company revenues to tumble and brought it within a hair’s breadth of collapse.
One-Man Fight
As the public dispute unfolded in decorous courtrooms, Milburn’s computer prowess was tested to its limits in what amounted to a digital home invasion by what he later learned was one of the most prolific hacking teams in China. He waged his own desperate one-man fight without weapons or help from authorities, swapping out servers, puzzling over middle-of-the-night malfunctions, and watching his sales all but evaporate -- his every keystroke monitored by spies who had turned his technology against him.
Milburn, 61, rarely took a day off during that time as he struggled around the clock to keep his computer network running and his firm afloat. He doubts he’ll ever know exactly what was going on, but he has theories.
“It felt like they had a plan,” says Milburn, sitting in his office two blocks from Santa Barbara’s main drag, where he’s now focused on rebuilding his business. “If they could just put the company out of business, the lawsuit goes away. They didn’t need guys with guns or someone to break my kneecaps.”