Operation Aurora – the cyber attack in the wake of Google’s confrontation with China – may be caused by two schools of Chinese technicians, according to a recent report. When the attacks were the first advertising, many security experts said the thefts were the work of highly sophisticated hackers. Now they are virtually silent.

News that students at two schools in China might be behind recent attacks on well-known line in Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and other large U.S. corporations doing business in China has security experts in search of protection.

McAfee, who has called the “hacks” Operation Dawn “, described the series of highly sophisticated attacks as a milestone in cybercrime.

The attacks have led to a confrontation between Google and megacompany of the government of China in Beijing on Internet censorship. Google’s position has won the vocal support of several senior members of the U.S. government. The events have also prompted the Chinese authorities to crack down on hackers.

Chinese Hackers do better?

Online attacks have been linked with Shanghai Jiaotong University and the School of Vocational Lanxiang, according to unnamed sources cited in a report in the New York Times.

Jiaotong University has one of the software in China. University students won the 2010 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest earlier this month. Nicknamed “The battle of the brains” contest pits teams of top 103 universities in the world against each other in using open source technology to design software that solves real world problems. It’s organized by IBM (NYSE: IBM).

Lanxiang is a vocational school that was established with the military support of China and some train computer scientists for the military, the Times said.

Like some of the military establishments of other countries, China’s military has long been suspected of carrying out cyberprobes of the defenses of other countries and of being behind some attacks on the governments of other digital infrastructures.

Aurora is the Light of attenuation?

As evidence emerged about Operation Dawn, many security experts is the attacks are the work of hackers with great experience.

In announcing the intrusion on the network in January, Google described the attack as “highly sophisticated” and revealed that at least 20 other major U.S. companies had been beaten.

The level of sophistication in the attacks completely changed the threat model, Dmitiri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research from McAfee, said shortly after the announcement of Google. Other cybersecurity vendors were quick to jump on the bandwagon and announce the wit and sophistication of the hackers behind Aurora.

Now, however, security vendors seem to be running for cover.

Alperovitch refused to discuss whether the attacks came from Chinese schools mentioned in the Times report, if the servers of the school could have been used as a conduit for external hackers and how the Chinese school students could use the attacks of a sophistication level of professional cyber criminals had not used before.

“Mr. Alperovitch said that McAfee will not comment on these questions at this time,” Heather Edell, the public relations agency McAfee Red Consultancy, told TechNewsWorld.

However, it said the botnet Kneber, affecting 75,000 computers in nearly 2,500 companies worldwide, has nothing to do with Operation Dawn.

Kaspersky Lab also declined to comment on the latest news about Operation Aurora.”Kaspersky not offer general comments on these issues at this time,” company spokesman Greg Sabey told TechNewsWorld.

More significantly, Google, which announced the news of the attack on the world, is keeping mum. ”We will not comment on our ongoing investigation,” Google spokesman said Jay Nancarrow TechNewsWorld.

The consequences of Aurora

Google’s announcement in the attack on its infrastructure and its claims that Chinese hackers were behind Operation Aurora exacerbated the bad blood between China and the U.S. Beijing censorship on the Internet.

It also forced Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to repair Internet Explorer zero-day flaw through which the pirates carried out their attack. IE flaw that forced Germany and France for its citizens suggest stop using IE, at least temporarily.

Then Google upped the ante by reportedly bringing in the National Security Agency to investigate the hack, which in turn prompted concerns among privacy advocates in the U.S.

Google’s announcement that China was behind Operation Aurora also divided the security community. Some noted that cybercriminals foreigners from another country can be simply working through servers located in China, while others believed that Chinese hackers were indeed responsible.

The controversy also led the Chinese to crack down on hackers. Chinese police shut down the Black Hawk Security Network, a hacker central site, earlier this month.

So what we know about who is behind Operation Aurora? Nothing, really. Even the latest information about Chinese schools involved is suspect. ”I’m not aware of any information from The New York Times, Google’s Nancarrow said.