CBC.ca is 
reporting that the Canadian National Research Council, a government department Council which carries out advanced research in aerospace, health, mining and physics, was compromised by Chinese hackers.
Quoting the CBC’s article:
Chinese hackers used tempting emails, malware and password theft to worm their way into National Research Council computers in pursuit of valuable scientific and trade secrets, a newly released federal analysis reveals.
The attack, which prompted a shutdown of the government research council’s computer network in July, relied on textbook moves commonly seen in state-sponsored digital assaults, says the case study by the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre.
Highly skilled perpetrators used complex techniques to infiltrate the council and “establish a foothold” within its networks, says the study, released under the Access to Information Act.
Portions of the document remain secret because they deal with computer-system vulnerabilities or methods used to protect networks.
The basic first pass attack though was using ‘spear-phishing’ – targeted emails to users who opened the attachments and ran code which infected their computers, from there, the hackers were able to reach out and infect larger and more important areas of the network.
Always be careful when receiving attachments from untrusted sources.
If in doubt, and you do not think that there is private information in the attachment, forward the email to ‘[email protected]’ – they will scan the attachment and advise if the email contains malware. This week we had one attachment which was undetected, followed this procedure and without hours, ESET had updated the definitions with the brand new threat. By smart, be safe and be part of the solution.