Slashdot Mirror
Taiwan Under Cyber Attack from China
An anonymous reader writes: "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting this morning that Taipei is under cyber attack by a Chinese 'army of hackers'. The Taipei government is saying that the attacks are trojan-horses against windows machines that are being staged to break in to government databases."
Show your hate for SCO
Now please, don't flame me as a fan of mainland China's repressive regime. But the Taiwanese government doesn't exactly have the world's best track record, as I recall. I hear occasional notes about "problems" with civil rights, and then there's the whole pirated anime problem.
So when I read this line:
"National intelligence has indicated that an army of hackers based in China..."
my BS-o-Meter starts clicking. Though the article is non-technical, it includes other notes that make the meter tick faster:
"...has successfully spread 23 different Trojan horse programs... 10 private high-tech companies... break into at least 30 different government agencies and 50 private companies," Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung said yesterday.
We have a lot of big, scary numbers... but no hard information about the programs, the companies, or the government agencies.
In fact, the "23 different Trojans" makes me think that the government cabinet member is talking out of his butt. More likely, nobody's been running virus protection, and those 24 Trojans are simply members of F-Secure's wildlist.
Then, there's this "helpful" suggestion:
"If there's any lesson from this experience, it is not to use software developed in China or hire Chinese computer programmers, because you're running the risk of having the software you use implanted with the Trojan-horse program," he said.
That sounds like nothing more than the usual tit-for-tat barbs that Taiwan and China have been throwing across the strait for decades. In fact, I suspect that's what this whole Trojan Horse issue is -- all bluster, no substance.
And finally, off the actual topic: let's watch the Slashdot effect in action! When I first hit the Taipei Times article, it included this text at the bottom:
This story has been viewed 1128 times.
By the time I typed this comment, the number had not changed, so I'm probably getting a cached copy. What did it show when you hit it?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Yu made the remark yesterday morning during the weekly closed-door Cabinet meeting, in which Minister without Portfolio Tsai Ching-yen briefed Yu on the matter.
I hadn't realized that I talked with China or Tiawan latley.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Right, because China cares so much more about OSs than Taiwan. Thats why they have nukes aimed at Redmond.
Your paranoia is about as subtle as the alien probe in your neck.
I fully expect this on the big screen in a few years.
~
~
:wq
It's only with the advent of the Internet that the two are suddenly in contact in meaningful ways. In a strange twist, and in many cases the Chinese government is in a position where they have to defend Taiwan against these kinds of attacks from their own citizens!
It's a strange, strange world. And as we grow more connected, it's getting more so every day. So buy SCOX stock.
It's interesting that this is happening now, after china has acquired windows' source code. Could they have found newer vulnarabilities that no one knows about yet?
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
Well, this is the first I've learned of it. My ultra cheap standard issue 1.5Mbps DSL connection seems to be going just fine. Got a few connections to the WayBack machine going and I just finished the rounds at a dozen web sites, EETimes, DisplaySearch, BioTech East, Digitimes, Google News and on and on. None of them had any problems, nice snappy connections. A few of those are in Taiwan so locally and internationally the network itself seems fine.
The only thing I couldn't get to was the feakin' story at the notoriously paranoid Taipei Times because apparently the greater threat to the local net than the mainland is slashdotting!
Please help me decide who to cheer for.
How do they know "China" (as in the Chinese government) is attacking Taipei, instead of just a group of people? I mean, if Joe Hacker from the USA attacks the Belgium government servers do you call it an attack by Joe Hacker or an attack by the USA?
This just in...
The Taipei Times is under attack from a group of computer experts in the United States. The group, calling themselves Slashdot, have bombarded the Taipei website with so many hits, that it cannot distribute web pages anymore.
More on this story at eleven.
It rebooted. China 0wns
me. Blue screen now red.
Sig Applied For
1) It would be cool in a movie, but in real life these things are true weapons. You can bring down electrical systems, stall trains, release sewage into the water supply. Real people can die real deaths because of these.
2) I think the possibility of low-level warfare is more dangerous than bombs. The cold war shows this: if you only have maximum response, then you will hesitate to use it. If you have lots of low-level responses (car bombs, plane hijackings, etc ) than it is easier to assault your enemy short of war. This is a totalitarian regime attacking their enemy without anybody raising their DEFCON levels. That is scary.
You can't really take a pee in China without government sanction. If you think that rebellious feeling Chinese can just spontaneously gather and cary out a non-approved actiivty, then I have a nice prison cell filled with falun gong practicers to sell you. Get real.
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
What's really interesting is that Microsoft allowed China access to the source code from Windows. Could the Chinese have used this information to aid in attacking Taiwan?