The Canadian researchers cooperated in their investigation with a volunteer group of security experts in the United States 2GB MP5 Player at the Shadowserver Foundation, which focuses on Internet criminal activity.

“This would definitely rank in the sophisticated range,” said Steven Adair, a security research with the group. “While we don’t know exactly who’s behind it, we know they selected their targets with great care.”

By gaining access to the control servers used by the second cyber gang, the researchers observed the theft of a wide range of material, including classified documents from the Indian government and reports taken from Indian military analysts and corporations, as well as documents from agencies of the United Nations and other governments.

“We snuck around behind the backs of the attackers and picked their pockets,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a political scientist who is director of the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research group at the Munk School. “I’ve not seen anything remotely close to the depth and the sensitivity of the documents that we’ve recovered.”

The researchers said the second spy ring was more sophisticated and difficult to detect than the Ghostnet operation.

By examining a series of e-mail addresses, the investigators traced the attacks to hackers who appeared to be based in Chengdu, which is 4GB MP5 Player home to a large population from neighboring Tibet. Researchers believe that one hacker used the code name “lost33” and that he may have been affiliated with the city’s prestigious University of Electronic Science and Technology. The university publishes books on computer hacking and offers courses in “network attack and defense technology” and “information conflict technology,” according to its Web site.

Editor’s Note: Additional material was added to this story at 5 p.m. on April 6, 2010.

Physicists have reported synthesizing element 117, the latest achievement in their quest to create “superheavy” elements in the laboratory. A paper describing the discovery has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

A team led by Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, reports smashing together calcium-48 — an isotope with 20 protons and 28 neutrons — and berkelium-249, which has 97 protons and 152 neutrons. The collisions spit out either three or four neutrons, creating two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons.

Sigurd Hofmann, a nuclear physicist at the GSI research center in Darmstadt, Germany, calls the new work on element 117 “convincing.”

Most elements heavier than uranium, which 8GB MP5 Player has 92 protons, do not exist stably in nature and must be made artificially in the laboratory.

The Russians collaborated with U.S. researchers, including some from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the berkelium target was made. Berkelium, with atomic number 97, is another of the rare artificially produced elements; the Russian team was able to obtain just 22 milligrams of it from Oak Ridge.