China hackers break into five oil companies

The cybercriminals compromised servers in the United States and Netherlands to infiltrate oil, gas, and petrochemical companies in the United States, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, and Greece. Roughly a dozen companies were penetrated, with five firms confirming the attacks, the report said.
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First the hackers broke into servers by injecting a malicious code in Structured Query Language (SQL), the computer language used for large-scale databases (read about how a hacker used SQL injection to steal credit card information in the biggest online theft case in U.S. history.) Then they sent bogus e-mails to dupe recipients using employee laptops into submitting confidential information, a social engineering technique known as spear-phishing. The hackers also compromised corporate VPN accounts to reach the company's defense architecture.