More Journalists' emails hacked in China

"A lot of people I used to contact in Lanzhou, Xi'an and elsewhere have not been reachable by phone for the past few weeks," he said, noting that he set up the Yahoo email account to contact them.

The latest incident comes days after Google announced it would move its Chinese-language search services out of China due to censorship concerns.

Several journalists in China and Taiwan found they were unable to access their accounts beginning March 25, among them Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist in Beijing.

The New York Times writer, Andrew Jacobs, who is based in Beijing said his Yahoo Plus account had been set, without his knowledge, to forward to another, unknown, account.

"It's very unsettling," said Clifford Coonan, China correspondent for Variety magazine. His e-mail account was blocked last week after Yahoo noticed that someone unauthorised had gained access to it remotely. "You can't help but wonder why you've been targeted."

The attacks, began the very week that Google infuriated China by pulling the plug on its mainland China search engine and routed search engine requests via Hong Kong. Google explained the move as a principled objection to stepped up censorship and attacks that compromised Google e-mails of reporters and human rights activists in China.

Starting last April, those attacks affected numerous American corporations and individuas hostile to the practices of China's authoritarian government.

Typically Gmail accounts were set to forward emails to unfamiliar addresses, without the owners knowledge.

Dana Lengkeek, a Yahoo spokeswoman, would not discuss the specific incidents, citing company policy. "We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach."

"Yahoo! condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose," she told Reuters.

"We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach."

The NY Times reported that "victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States, an analyst who writes about China's security apparatus and several print journalists based in Beijing and Taipei, the capital of Taiwan."

Google's announcement of the hacking attacks drew unprecedented outside attention to cyber-security and China's Internet controls, used to limit discussion of topics deemed sensitive or threatening to "social stability."

Google said Wednesday said it had identified cyber attacks aimed at silencing opposition to a Vietnamese government-led bauxite mining project involving a major Chinese firm. The attacks were separate from, and less sophisticated than, those at the heart of the company's friction with Beijing.

China's control of the Internet and media has been stepped up under the current leadership and reflects a lack of understanding of the Chinese public, said Hao Xiaoming, a China media expert at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information in Singapore.

"China is going back rather than going forward in terms of information and control. That reflects the lack of confidence in the (current) Chinese leaders," Hao said.

"China's Internet has become a controlled Internet, an internal Internet rather than linked internationally. It defeats the whole purpose."

Very few of the other firms mentioned by Google in January as having been affected by the attack have identified themselves.

Yahoo said at the time that it was "aligned" with Google's position, but its Chinese partner, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, called that position "reckless."

Yahoo is more vulnerable that Google because it keeps some of its email servers in China. Yahoo was harshly criticized by the U.S. Congress when it released to Chinese authorities information relating to the account of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who was then sentenced to 10 years in jail for revealing state secrets.