Dale Amon describes the shady nature of life on the front lines in the cyberwar. There is some good advice on computer security in comments.

Looking at the story, there's too many holes to claim that this is some sort of state effort by either Russia or China. Perhaps, we'd have a better idea if we knew what emails the hackers described in the story were grabbing.

Organized crime could easily muster the resources to do what is described in the story. For example, I seem to recall hearing that a lot of KGB types went on into organized crime. So it doesn't strike me as unlikely that there's some sort of packet sniffer either on Russia's backbone, in the hotel where the CEO victim stayed, or somewhere in between. After all, virtually any machine with an internet connection can be made into one.

It does strike me as odd that the "Great Wall" of China that apparently does such a good job monitoring its citizens for various on-line acts of subversion or revealing "state secrets", seems strangely to utterly fail when it comes to blocking on-line criminal activity originating from inside China's borders.

There may be "holes" in the story, because Dale is not providing all of the information, for reasons he states, but there's nothing inconsistent with the story and his theory that I see.