UNITED Nations officials have suggested that computer hackers who pilfered thousands of emails and files from a British university were probably paid to undermine the Copenhagen climate change summit.
And according to a British newspaper investigation, the emails emerged from a server operated from a small red building in the Siberian city of Tomsk.
The Mail on Sunday reported that the server is primarily used by Tomsk State University. In 2002, ''hacker patriots'' believed to be students from the institution, acted against a site that had reported events in Chechnya and angered Russian officials.
UN officials confirmed that the files appeared to have been first uploaded on to a website from a computer in Russia, suggesting that the culprits were not amateur climate change sceptics but paid professionals.
They first appeared on a website run by climate change sceptics on November 17.
On Sunday, Achim Steiner, the director of the United Nations Environment Program, said the theft of emails from East Anglia University's climate research unit, a globally renowned climate research institute and keeper of British temperature data, was reminiscent of the Watergate scandal, which brought down US president Richard Nixon.
But he stressed that it was ''not climategate, it's hackergate''.
''Let's not forget the word 'gate' refers to a place [the Watergate building] where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that.''
Jean Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said publication of the emails had undermined efforts by the panel to convince the 192 nations who were to meet at the Copenhagen summit.
''If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data, but it's a carefully made selection of emails and documents that's not random at all. This is 13 years of data and it's not a job of amateurs.
''It's very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,'' he said.
At the time of the student action against the site reporting on Chechnya, the Russian Secret Service said the students' actions were a legitimate ''expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect'', the Mail reported.
The officials' comments imply that Russia, one of the world's largest producers and users of oil and gas, may have sanctioned the hacking in a bid to undermine sweeping new agreements on emissions cuts.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed the leaked emails ''looked very bad'', but urged the media to scrutinise how the files were obtained.
Computer specialists from Scotland Yard are reported to be helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.
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