Washington Post becomes third US newspaper to be targeted in suspected Chinese hacking attack The Chinese Embassy in Washington and officials in Beijing did not respond to calls from The Washington Post. The newspaper quoted "people familiar with the incident" as saying the attack originated in China, after Bryan Krebs, a former Post journalist who now runs a cyber-security blog, broke the story. A former Washington Post information technology employee who helped respond to the break-in told him: "We spent the better half of 2012 chasing down compromised PCs and servers. [It] all pointed to being hacked by the Chinese. They had the ability to get around to different servers and hide their tracks. They seemed to have the ability to do anything they wanted on the network. The intruders gained access as early as 2008 or 2009, according to these accounts. In 2011, the Post's internet security company disarmed the malicious software, which had been sending a signal to an Internet server associated with a Chinese hacking group. Asked on Thursday about cyber-attacks on other media organisations, China's defence ministry said: "The Chinese military has never supported any hack attacks. Cyberattacks have transnational and anonymous characteristics. It is unprofessional and groundless to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyber attacks without any conclusive evidence. The New York Times reported last week that Chinese hackers had persistently attacked the organisation, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. The launch of the attacks coincided with an investigation by the newspaper that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings. The Wall Street Journal reported a similar incident the next day. China is believed to use cyber-espionage to assist efforts to suppress dissenting voices. China has been accused of hacking the servers of Google to monitor emails and target groups and think tanks that study China. The revelation comes as Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, has described China as the most "sophisticated and prolific" hacker of foreign companies in his forthcoming book, according to leaked extracts.