Carolyn Kaster / AP file

National security adviser Tom Donilon speaks during the daily news briefing at the White House in Washington on Thursday, May 17, 2012.

Chinese leaders must address cybersecurity threats emanating from their country on “an unprecedented scale” or risk weakening the economic relationship between Beijing and the United States, White House national security adviser Tom Donilon said Monday.

“U.S. businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyberintrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,” said Donilon.  “The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country.”

The remarks, delivered to The Asia Society in New York, are the first by a White House official to specifically name China as a threat to U.S. cybersecurity.

Though Donilon focused mainly on the danger to U.S. businesses, he did acknowledge the risk such an attack could pose to U.S. national security.  He said that the issue has become “a key point of concern and discussion with China at all levels of our governments” and that President Barack Obama has vowed to do what is necessary to protect America’s interests against cyberattacks.  

During last month’s State of the Union address, Obama highlighted how vulnerable America’s financial institutions, power grid and air traffic control systems could be to an attack.  The president, who has signed an executive order to help address those concerns, called on Congress to pass comprehensive legislation that would better secure online networks to help protect against attacks.

The president never mentioned China during his high-profile address.

But on Monday, Donilon was much more direct, detailing three requests for Beijing, including recognition of the severity of the problem, “serious steps” to address it and establishing guidelines of acceptable norms in the digital realm.   

“Both countries face risks when it comes to protecting personal data and communications, financial transactions, critical infrastructure, or the intellectual property and trade secrets that are so vital to innovation and economic growth,” said Donilon.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Donilon’s remarks indicate an aggressive shift in how the administration deals with China. It is a pivot, Lewis said, that comes as more and more data pours in pointing to China as the biggest culprit behind cyberattacks.

“The atmosphere has just changed; the data is overwhelming,” he said.

Lewis said protecting digital institutions is more diplomatically framed as an economic issue instead of a security one to avoid stirring threats of military action. Still it is significant the debut of the administration’s sterner policy came from the president’s top security adviser, he said.   

A report released in February by a private security firm found a Chinese military unit hacked more than 140 businesses, mostly inside the United States.  It’s a claim the Chinese government denies.

Media giants The New York Times and Wall Street Journal say they had been hacked for months and through an investigation with the FBI, traced the intrusions back to China.  The Wall Street Journal said the hacking was aimed at monitoring the newspaper’s China reporting, a claim that the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry called “irresponsible.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney said cybersecurity will be one of the priorities the president addresses with congressional leaders when he visits Capitol Hill this week.

And the United States is not alone. European countries have suspected China has infiltrated their computer systems as well.  Nations could retaliate with sanctions against Beijing.

“It’s become a problem that China can’t ignore without harming their economy,” said Lewis.

Rick Wilking / Reuters file

First Lt Michael Newman examines a server rack that is isolated from the Internet at the Air Force Space Command Network Operations & Security Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., in July 2010.

The United States is locked in a tight race with China and Russia to build destructive cyberweapons capable of seriously damaging other nations’ critical infrastructure, according to a leading expert on hostilities waged via the Internet.

Scott Borg, CEO of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit institute that advises the U.S. government and businesses on cybersecurity, said all three nations have built arsenals of sophisticated computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other tools that place them atop the rest of the world in the ability to inflict serious damage on one another, or lesser powers.

Ranked just below the Big Three, he said, are four U.S. allies: Great Britain, Germany, Israel and perhaps Taiwan.

But in testament to the uncertain risk/reward ratio in cyberwarfare, Iran has used attacks on its nuclear program to bolster its offensive capabilities and is now developing its own "cyberarmy," Borg said.

Borg offered his assessment of the current state of cyberwar capabilities Tuesday in the wake of a report by the American computer security company Mandiant linking hacking attacks and cyber espionage against the U.S. to a sophisticated Chinese group known as “Peoples Liberation Army Unit 61398.

In today’s brave new interconnected world, hackers who can defeat security defenses are capable of disrupting an array of critical services, including delivery of water, electricity and heat, or bringing transportation to a grinding halt. U.S. senators last year received a closed-door briefing at which experts demonstrated how a power company employee could take down the New York City electrical grid by clicking on a single email attachment, the New York Times reported.

U.S. officials rarely discuss offensive capability when discussing cyberwar, though several privately told NBC News recently that the U.S. could "shut down" the electrical grid of a smaller nation -- Iran, for example – if it chose to do so.

Borg echoed that assessment, saying the U.S. cyberwarriors, who work within the National Security Agency, are “very good across the board. … There is a formidable capability.”

“Stuxnet and Flame (malware used to disrupt and gather intelligence on Iran's nuclear program) are demonstrations of that,” he said. “… (The U.S.) could shut down most critical infrastructure in potential adversaries relatively quickly.”

China, Russia have different priorities
Borg said China and Russia have similar capacity to cause mayhem, but have different priorities and skill sets.

usccu.us

Scott Borg says the U.S. possesses a 'formidable capability' to wage cyberwar.

“Russia is best at military espionage and operations,” he said. “That's what they have focused on for a long time. China is looking for crucial business information and technology. China's main focus is stealing technology. These things quite separate. You use different tools on critical infrastructure than you use for military espionage and different tools again on stealing technology."

Borg said that each has its strong suit. "The Russians are technically advanced. The Chinese just have more people dedicated to the effort, by a wide margin,” he said. “They are not as innovative or creative as the U.S. and Russia. China has the greatest quantity, if not quality."

Borg said the group featured in Mandiant’s report, the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, may be one of the most important groups working in China, but not necessarily the most important.

"There are at least two dozen groups carrying out aggressive operations against the U.S.,” he said. “They get in each other’s way and trip over one another, but they are all operating with the tacit approval of the Chinese government.

"They're not cooperating with each other because they don’t share capabilities," he added. "One group has good programming, but is bad at access or targeting." 

The Chinese hacking efforts are so broad, Borg said, that the highest-ranking Chinese officials “almost certainly do not know what all the groups are doing,” or the consequences. As a result, he added, they have been embarrassed by reports like the one in Tuesday’s New York Times, which first reported on the Mandiant assessment.

China is the most likely of the superpowers to leave a calling card, making their work the easiest to track. "China is very arrogant in its authorship of cyberweapons,” Borg said. “It does little to conceal its identity."

That’s in sharp contrast to the Russians, who he noted are not above writing code in Chinese to throw off investigators.

While the U.S. could respond to ongoing cyberattacks from China and Russia by shutting down the power grid of "any of its adversaries” and causing severe physical damage, Borg said it is encumbered by several factors.

One is its vulnerability to cyberwarfare as the world’s most networked nation, he said.

And from a geopolitical standpoint, Borg said, the U.S. would not want to badly damage the economy of either China or Russia. In fact, he said, the U.S. would almost certainly have to incorporate protections for critical systems like the power grid in any cyberattack.

Also, detecting the source of hostilities is not always easy, Borg said, as cybertracks are not as easy to follow as missile tracks. That means “mutually assured destruction,” the main strategic tenet of the Cold War, is problematic at best when talking about cyberwar, he said.

"It might be difficult to determine proportionate response,” he said. “It might not be simple to attack the attacker.”

For example, policymakers may think an attack has been carried out by the Chinese, when it was actually the work of the Russians or a rising power in the cyber world, like Iran. That is why intelligence -- getting insight into these operations -- is more important in a crisis than cyberforensics, which can take longer and not be as certain.

"There is no MAD in the Cold War sense," he said, "You can’t be 'assured' of attribution. The attack can be anonymous. It can be spoofed," or disguised as coming from another source. 

Iran developing 'serious capability'
The U.S. first began to develop its own offensive capabilities 20 years ago when several strategic thinkers, particularly at the Naval Post-Graduate School, began to see the possibilities. It was not so much a strategic priority, but more "people familiar with electronics and hackers exercising their imagination." (Borg says one of those thinkers, Winn Schwartau, used fiction to discuss the threat and the possibilities, in a 1991 book, "Terminal Compromise.")

While the U.S. has the means to respond and to defend itself, Borg notes that some countries have no recourse. He cited the Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia in August 2008, when the Georgian government and media infrastructure was quickly compromised.

What was particularly interesting, Borg said, was that the Russian military and intelligence services weren’t directly involved.

"The first wave was carried by organized crime," he noted. "The second wave was carried out by a (hacker) group organized though social media.” He said Russian hackers could download the attack software from a variety of popular sites, including dating and gun-collecting websites.

In both cases, Borg concluded, the organizers apparently were tipped off early about the timing of Russian military operations, he said.

The attack on Georgia also illustrated another aspect of cyberwarfare, Borg said, noting that Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania afterward formed a cyberalliance, leaving them in a better position to deal with future assaults.

That also appears to be the case with Iran, which recently announced that it decided to establish cyber army and claimed to have 4,000 to 5,000 military personnel involved in defensive and offensive operations. That isn’t all bluster, Borg said, noting that when the U.S. leveled new sanctions on Iranian banks last year, U.S. banks suddenly came under attack.

"Iran is developing a serious capability," said Borg. “It's exaggerating the present capabilities, but it’s working toward the future."

That’s especially troubling because the risk of smaller nations waging cyberwar against one other may be higher than with the online superpowers, he said.

He cited reports indicating that Iran may have been behind what he called one of the more serious cyberattacks to date -- an assault last August on the Saudi Aramco computer network that disabled more than 30,000 computers used to control the flow of Saudi oil. The Saudi Interior Ministry blamed "foreign countries" for the attack.

Borg said he believes the attack was an "Iranian fundamentalist attack ... at some point loosely the under auspices of Iran, and blessed by Iran. The fundamentalist group made a claim of responsibility. ... “Based on technical analysis, the claim has credibility."

For that reason, Borg says he is less worried about the possibility of China or Russia launching a catastrophic attack against the U.S. than he is about the emerging cyberpowers.

“What I’m really concerned about isn’t Russia or China, but attacks from Iran or terrorist groups working with state actors,” he said.

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A Huawei telecommunication array, displayed in a company exhibition hall in Shenzhen, China, on March 2012.

LONDON -- In the summer of 2008, Iranian security agents arrived at the family home of Saleh Hamid, who was visiting his parents in Iran during a break from his university studies. 

The plainclothes agents, he says, shackled him and drove him blindfolded to a local intelligence detention center. There, he says, they beat him with an iron bar, breaking bones and damaging his left ear and right eye.

Hamid says the authorities accused him of spreading propaganda against the regime and contacting opposition groups outside Iran. The evidence? His own phone calls.

"They said, ‘On this and this day you spoke to such and such person,'" says Hamid, now 30 and a human rights activist in Sweden. "They had both recorded it and later they also showed me the transcript."

Hamid was not the only one. The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center and other human rights groups say they have documented a number of cases in which the Iranian regime has used the country's communications networks to crack down on dissidents by monitoring their telephone calls or Internet activities.

Now a Reuters investigation has uncovered new evidence of how willing some foreign companies were to assist Iran's state security network, and the regime's keenness to access as much information as possible.

Documents seen by Reuters show that a partner of China's Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. offered to sell a Huawei-developed "Lawful Interception Solution" to MobinNet, Iran's first nationwide wireless broadband provider, as MobinNet was preparing to launch in 2010.

The system's capabilities included "supporting the special requirements from security agencies to monitor in real time the communication traffic between subscribers," according to a proposal by Huawei's Chinese partner seen by Reuters.

The headquarters of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. in Shenzhen, China.

Huawei also gave MobinNet a marketing presentation on a system that features "deep packet inspection" -- a powerful and potentially intrusive technology that can read and analyze "packets" of data that travel across the Internet. Internet service providers use DPI to guard against cyberattacks and improve network efficiency, but it also can be used to block websites, track Internet users and reconstruct email messages.

Huawei says it has never sold either system to MobinNet and doesn't sell DPI equipment in Iran. But a person familiar with the matter says MobinNet obtained a Huawei DPI system before it began operating in 2010. The person does not know how MobinNet acquired it or if it is being used.

Asked to comment, Vic Guyang, a Huawei spokesman, said in a statement, "We think it's not for us to confirm or deny what systems other companies have." He later said, "It is our understanding that MobinNet does not have such equipment." An official with MobinNet declined to answer any questions, saying only, "So you know the answers. Why do you need confirmation?"

The relative ease with which Iran has been able to obtain technology that enables surveillance illustrates the cat-and-mouse nature of the American-European campaign to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions through crippling economic sanctions. It wasn't until this year that Europe and Washington -- which primarily have focused on Iran's banks and oil industry -- targeted the sale of monitoring gear to Iran. But even now, the ban is not global, and does not extend to Chinese companies.

Reuters reported in March that China's ZTE Corp had recently sold Iran's largest telecom firm, Telecommunication Co. of Iran, a DPI-based surveillance system that was capable of monitoring landline, mobile and internet communications.

ZTE later said it intends to reduce its business in Iran. Huawei made a similar announcement a year ago.

Fixing ‘the problem of youth’
The documents seen by Reuters challenge statements made by Shenzhen-based Huawei that it doesn't sell any Internet monitoring or filtering equipment.  

But the documents' descriptions of the Huawei systems pitched to MobinNet emphasize their filtering capabilities and ability to enable monitoring by security agencies.

For example, a proposal made to MobinNet dated April 2009 offers what it calls a Huawei "lawful interception" solution. The proposal was prepared by China's CMEC International Trading Co., which states in the document that it had selected Huawei as its bid partner.

"As we know, lawful interception is mandatory and sensitive for the operators in Iran," the proposal states.

An accompanying diagram illustrates how the system can duplicate data streams and transmit the copies to multiple "monitoring" centers. It also states that more than 0.5 percent of all subscribers could be targeted and that individuals would not be aware their communications were "being intercepted."

CMEC is a part of an engineering conglomerate that includes a unit that for years has been under U.S. sanctions for allegedly helping Iran and Iraq obtain weapons of mass destruction. CMEC didn't respond to a request for comment. Huawei says it no longer partners with CMEC.

U.S. and other international sanctions are designed to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons; Iran says its nuclear program is aimed purely at producing domestic energy.

Although Huawei maintains it doesn't sell any filtering technologies, its presentation given to MobinNet, marked confidential, repeatedly says its "DPI Solution" features "URL filtering," which can be used to block specific websites. The presentation also cites a number of customer "success" case studies -- including in Britain, Russia, Colombia, and China -- where it says telecommunication operators were using its system to filter websites.

For example, the presentation states that a Chinese telecoms firm was using the Huawei system "to settle the problem of youth getting secure and healthy access to websites, and the traffic should be controllable." The presentation also states that the system was used during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games to block "illegal" Internet phone services, filter websites and to conduct "user behavior analysis."

In a series of emailed statements, Guyang, the Huawei spokesman, did not address Huawei's claim that it doesn't "provide any services related to monitoring of filtering." But he says website filtering is used by many telecoms, including in the U.S., "as part of efforts to counter cyberterrorism, child pornography, smuggling of narcotics and other crimes, as well as illegal websites and data."

He said Huawei "did not sell products containing this function in Iran." He also said the Huawei system described in the proposal -- the Quidway SIG9800 -- can't access "content" in the telecommunications network.

But a former Huawei employee who has worked in Iran said the SIG9800 can be used to reconstruct email messages provided they are not encrypted. "This product has some special usage which Huawei customers do not like to share ... especially in Iran," said the former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Storing every text message
The proposal to MobinNet for the Huawei lawful-intercept system states that it includes technology from a German company called Utimaco Safeware AG. Utimaco says Huawei is one of its worldwide resellers but that neither MobinNet directly -- nor Huawei on behalf of MobinNet -- purchased or licensed its products.

The proposal also states that Huawei equipment at another Iranian telecom had "already successfully integrated with" an Utimaco product "and accumulated rich integration experience, which will be shared."

The other Iranian telecom isn't named but Malte Pollmann, Utimaco's chief executive officer, confirmed that in 2006, Nokia's German unit had purchased Utimaco software for MTN Irancell, Iran's second-largest mobile phone operator which has a major contract with Huawei. He said the product hadn't been maintained for several years and that Utimaco believes it no longer is being used.

MTN Irancell is 49 percent owned by South Africa's MTN Group, Africa's largest telecom carrier. It declined to comment about the Utimaco product.

Interviews and internal MTN documents reviewed by Reuters show that prior to MTN Irancell's launch, Iranian intelligence authorities took a keen interest in the capabilities of its lawful-intercept system, and pushed to make it more intrusive.

Like most countries, including the United States, Iran requires telephone operators to provide law enforcement authorities with access to communications. But people who have worked at Iranian telecoms say authorities sometimes abused their access, targeting certain individuals without a warrant or with little or no explanation.

In response, a spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York emailed a section of Iran's constitution which states that recording telephone calls, eavesdropping and censorship "are forbidden, except as provided by law." 

The terms of MTN Irancell's license agreement stipulated that Iran's security agency could record and monitor subscribers' communications, including voice, data, fax, text messaging and voicemail, the internal MTN documents show. "At least 1 percent of all subscribers" could be targeted, and authorities wanted access to their location -- "within 10 to 20 meters" -- as well as billing information, according to the documents.

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According to a person familiar with the matter, prior to its launch, Iranian authorities pushed MTN Irancell to provide them with even more surveillance capabilities. The requests included copying and storing all text messages on the network for 30 days and providing 36 different monitoring centers with access to communications. 

The authorities also wanted to be able to intercept every call handled by an individual mobile-phone tower. "They were not talking of a single tower, they were talking of a large number of towers," the person said. "That is not the norm."

MTN, which oversaw the telecom's launch, didn't express to the authorities any concern about potential abuse, according to this person. Rather, the company argued during a series of meetings that the new requirements weren't part of the scope of the licensing agreement. MTN offered to add other surveillance capabilities over time, this person said.

MTN declined to comment. In April, its chief executive, Sifiso Dabengwa, said that any allegations that MTN was complicit in human rights abuses in Iran "are both false and offensive."

The Iranian intelligence authorities eventually agreed to hold off on their surveillance wish list - and allowed the telecom's launch. But they made clear they expected MTN Irancell would eventually install more capabilities, according to the person familiar with the situation.

The extent to which MTN Irancell later added new surveillance capabilities to its network remains unclear. The network did add enhanced location-based services in 2011.

A British company, Creativity Software, announced in August 2009 that it had won a contract to supply the technology, which it said would allow MTN Irancell to offer its customers special rates at home.

An official with Creativity Software did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement last year, the company said its sale was legal and "any connection implied between the provision of commercial location-based services deployed by MTN Irancell in Iran and any possible human rights abuses is ... erroneous."

Hamid, the human rights activist who says Iranian security agents told him in 2008 they had listened to his telephone conversations, says he had been using a cellphone he had purchased through MTN Irancell.

Then a student at a Syrian university, he said that he had returned to Iran to visit his family in Ahwaz, Khuzestan. The region is home to many Iranian Arabs who allege they have been subject to discrimination and economic deprivation by the Iranian government.

Now 30, Hamid said he eventually was released on bail and fled the country. But he said he was arrested in Iraq, jailed for three years and finally received refugee status in Sweden.

He said he was surprised that Iranian authorities had intercepted his phone calls. "I was completely taken aback," he said. "When I bought the Irancell mobile, I didn't even buy it in my name."

MTN declined to comment. The spokesman for Iran's U.N. mission said Hamid's allegations "are unfounded" and that Iran's constitution protects the rights of Iranian Arabs and other ethnic groups.

"Iran's constitution also bans any kind of torture and espionage," the spokesman added.

Additional reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Dubai.

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China Daily via Reuters, file

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao shakes hands with local workers in earthquake-hit Mianzhu, Sichuan province in this Jan. 25, 2009 file photo.

BEIJING – When news broke earlier this year that the family of disgraced Chongqing party boss, Bo Xilai, had amassed $160 million in ill-gotten earnings, the story was seen as a proverbial pin in the balloon China’s ruling Communist Party has long floated to its people about its leadership.

In China the storyline went something like this: local-level officials could be and have been corrupted. But China’s highest leaders were incorruptible, pious men who were sympathetic to the plight of the country’s citizenry.

Bo’s corruption and the transgressions of his inner circle have been very publicly renounced by the Communist Party. His wife, Gu Kailai, was found guilty of the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood while his former deputy police chief, Wang Lijun, was jailed and held up as a traitor after his now infamous flight to the American Consulate in Chengdu this past winter.

News Friday that Bo had been stripped of his last party title appears to pave the way for a convenient resolution of the scandal before a critical once-in-a-decade leadership changeover on Nov. 8 at the 18^th Communist Party Congress.

But the revelation in Friday’s New York Times that the family of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao controlled assets of at least $2.7 billion dollars posed a grave threat to the Party’s preferred narrative of being the honest broker that brings prosperity to all.

NYT report: China leader Wen Jiabao's family has amassed billions in assets since '98

So much so that Beijing was forced Friday to kick the censorship gears up a notch, blocking the English- and Chinese-language websites of the New York Times, blacking out mentions of the story on independent cable news channels carried in China, and censoring the names of Wen’s family and other mentions of the story on China’s Internet.     

At a Foreign Ministry briefing Friday, a spokesman gruffly stated that the Times’ report "blackens China's name and has ulterior motives." When asked why the paper’s website was being censored, he said, "China manages the Internet in accordance with laws and rules."

One piece of information not censored, however is a report released Thursday by the research group, Global Financial Integrity, which estimated $3.7 trillion dollars had been pilfered and smuggled out of China from 2000 through 2011.

The report also estimated that $472 billion -- or 8.3 percent of China’s 2011 gross domestic product -- had been stolen last year alone.

Just how guilty Wen is in his family’s nationwide money grab is up for debate. As the Times’ report noted, a 2007 diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks quoted an executive who noted that the premier was aware of his family’s lucrative business ventures: “Wen is disgusted with his family's activities, but is either unable or unwilling to curtail them."

Wen’s failure to reign in his family’s financial activities threatens to undermine the carefully scripted public persona he has cultivated over the years.

Slideshow: The dance of two giants

AFP - Getty Images

A click-through history of modern relations between the United States and China.

Launch slideshow

Nicknamed “Grandpa Wen” by state media, the premier has relished opportunities to be photographed connecting with members of rural communities and blue-collar workers. During the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he was a near-daily presence in news reports about the disaster and government rescue and recovery efforts.

He has also been dogged in his calls for economic reform and greater income equality. At this year’s National People’s Congress, during what was likely his last major press conference in a 45-year-long political career, Wen called for reform.

“Even with a single breath left, I am ready to dedicate myself fully to the cause of China’s reform,” he was quoted as saying.

Although Wen was speaking months before the release of the Times piece, he still apparently felt the need to address whispers about relatives trading on the family name. “I have never pursued personal gain,” declared Wen, before adding, “History will have the final say.”

Communist Party officials hope to control the writing of history. But the institution is starting to feel the strain of having to push an ever heavier stone uphill. The Internet has made information more widely available than ever before on the mainland; what censors just 10 years ago could make disappear – sometimes literally -- has become more problematic today.

Still, while completely squashing a story in China seems to no longer be possible, it may not be Beijing’s intention or even in its best interest to stifle information. Some Chinese have found ways to circumvent the Great Firewall, while millions have gone abroad, where they have been exposed to the world beyond. Allowing them the safety valve of relatively free information does not pose an immediate threat to Party rule for now.

That’s because the vast majority of China’s population appears to be apolitical, disinterested in or unwilling to engage in any meaningful political discourse. This situation is changing, quickly at times.

For now, however, the censorship of unpalatable stories is an effective albeit cumbersome tool for the Party to wield.

As for the New York Times, its fate in China looks dim. Just two months ago, Bloomberg ran a similar story that showed how the family of China’s likely future president, Xi Jinping, had also accumulated a vast business fortune – though unlike Wen’s kin, Xi’s immediate family did not appear to be reaping the same economic benefits.

Bloomberg’s website has since been blocked on the mainland. 

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She became a viral Internet sensation last week, mocked for her botched restoration of a century-old fresco at her local church - but Cecila Giminez has still attracted a few fans.

Flowers are being left outside the elderly woman’s home in the village of Borja, north-eastern Spain, and the damaged painting has suddenly become a tourist attraction.

The 19th-century fresco, which used to depict Jesus until Giminez’s misguided intervention, is attracting so many tourists that it has now been roped off and is watched over by a security guard.

Tens of thousands of people have signed an online petition praising Giminez’s restoration as a “daring work” and even as “endearing and loving act, a clever reflection of the political and social situation of our time”.

The family of the painter, Elias Garcis Martinez, does not see it that way – especially as they had just agreed to make a donation to have the painting professionally restored.

I can paint that! Wait, no I can't! Amateur artist messes up century-old artwork

''Until now she just painted on the tunic but the problem started when she painted the head as well, because she has destroyed this painting,'' the artist’s granddaughter Teresa Garcia told Spanish television.

Giminez, who is in her 80s, said she was trying to improve the artwork, which had become damaged by moisture, and insisted she had the permission of the priest.

A team of art restoration experts is reportedly examining the painting, will quiz Giminez on what materials she used in her attempt and will figure out how best to proceed. 

In the meantime, the restoration has been mocked in a series of Internet parodies including a fake Twitter account.

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BEIJING – Google has started telling users in China when web searches contain keywords that could be tracked by the country's keen-eyed censors, one of the company's top officials announced.

“Starting today we’ll notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues,” Alan Eustace, a Senior Vice President for Google, wrote on the company's Inside Search blog on Thursday.  “By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China.”

As the video on Eustace's blog shows (see below), triggering connectivity issues on Google.com.hk can be as easy as searching for one of the country’s greatest natural landmarks: The Yangtze River.

Presumably in this case, "Jiang" the Chinese character for river, is a sensitive term because it is also the last name of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. The 85-year-old, who is thought to still be politically connected, is the focus of constant erroneous rumors and reports about his death.

Consequently, if you are looking for "Chang Jiang," the popular name of the Yangtze River here in China, you could run afoul of sensors looking to block rumors of the former leader's death and have your connection to Google temporarily terminated.

Online coup rumors spark China crackdown on social media websites

The video on Eustace's blog shows how it took about 90 seconds after each sensitive search for the connection to be re-established on several Internet browsers and devices.

This graphic shows the message that will appear when users try to search for these restricted words:

Google

Google’s move will ostensibly allow users on the mainland to see when their searches are being censored and understand why the service is disrupted. Other Google products, such as Google Mail and Documents, often fail to load and frequently require refreshing or an enabled virtual private network (VPN) to access freely.

However, since Google’s high profile “pullout” of its search engine from China in 2010, Google’s share of the search market here in China has shrunk from 30 percent in 2009 to 16.6 percent in 2012, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.

Much of that share has been ceded to its Chinese rival, Baidu, which now dominates the arena with 78.5 percent of the search market. Even Google Maps, which was the most popular online mapping service on the mainland for some time, recently lost the top spot  to a competitor.

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Those dwindling mainland users who have undoubtedly already encountered search restrictions and disconnection issues before, but continue to rely on Google, will probably not benefit too much from the company's new measures. After all, many of the users who suffered through 90-second connection resets in the past have already turned to other ways to bypass the restrictions.

What this move will do, though, is help Google regain the moral high ground internationally by reclaiming “Don’t be Evil,” it's informal corporate motto. Google has long fought for a more open Internet around the world, and even created “Transparency Report,” which looks closely at net freedom issues.

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However, privacy issues in the United States and a European Union warning to Google to review its recently revamped privacy policies have haunted the Silicon Valley giant, forcing its data mining practices to the forefront.

Google’s new service may help some mainland Chinese users better understand how Beijing restricts its netizens from accessing certain material, but for the message to be really effective, Google first needs to get people to use its service again. 

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