This comes to us by way of Graham Cluley at Naked Security:
The New York Times has reported that for the last four months Chinese hackers have been infiltrating its networks, broken into the email accounts of senior staff, stolen the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees. ...
Malware was planted on users' computers which opened backdoors for the hackers to gain remote access to connected systems - including a domain controller that contained usernames and hashed passwords for all of the New York Times' employees. ...
In all, 45 custom-written malware samples are said to have been found on the network.
The hacking appeared to have begun after reporters started snooping into the wealth accumulations of Chinese government officials. But they can't prove who actually did it at this time.
Surely the New York Time had top-of-the-line security in place. So their vulnerability in spite of that suggests that everyone with access to the internet is vulnerable. I've often wondered if we all have some form of virus on our computers that's invisible to the off-the-shelf antivirus programs but which just sits there like a sleeper cell waiting for instructions.