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Chinese Websites Used As Launchpads For Cracking
An anonymous reader writes "A Washington Post article reports that Chinese networks are being used to breach hundreds of unclassified U.S. government systems. The article goes on to say that some analysts believe the activity to be tied to the Chinese government, although there is also some dissent." From the article: "Whether the attacks constitute a coordinated Chinese government campaign to penetrate U.S. networks and spy on government databanks has divided U.S. analysts. Some in the Pentagon are said to be convinced of official Chinese involvement; others see the electronic probing as the work of other hackers simply using Chinese networks to disguise the origins of the attacks."
I used to work in physical security (a clerical job I had in high school), and it was always fun to talk to the old-timers and hear their stories.
My favorite was about how the KGB operatives in DC in the late 50s stayed in good graces wtih their Moscow overloads with a minumum of effort:
They were supposed to keep tabs on the ongoings of the US political system by establishing inside contacts, and reporting back. So, they just summarized the political news from each day's New York Times, and kept their jobs for years.
The Americans pulled an good one on them: To spy at the Russian consolate in New York, the CIA recruited Xerox to install a minature camera in the consolate's copy equipment. When he came to do "regular maitenance" each month, he'd also replace the full tapes with new ones.
Sorry for no linkies, my source for these is an 80 year old CPP.
There is a difference between the citizens of a country knowing every detail of the government's actions and a country that is actively against many of those actions knowing. The problem is that most of the people I hear from seem to think that if everyone just would calm down, smoke some weed together and such that we would all be friends. No more adversaries... Right.
The US government has always been operating about 40-50% out of sight. Lately, as in the past 10 years or less, this has started to both become obvious and of a concern to some people that believe they should know what the government is doing and why. What they don't get is "what" is sometimes less important than "why" and "why" can be critically important. Often, very, very important to the people in other parts of the world where these actions are taking place.
Obviously, Al Queda would just love to get a "press briefing" about counter-terrorist actions in the US. Do you think that would be a good idea? At a more local level, how about if the police published a schedule of vacation days for officers? Then you could know when getting nailed for speeding was less likely because of a manpower shortage. This could also help coordinate bank robberies so there was less likelyhood of someone being injured in a chase.
Yes, absolutely I would agree that we are starting to see the effects of information being freely available and being compiled by organizations that do not have our best interested at heart. This is always going to be a problem at some level - in WWII Japan and Germany had spies doing nothing more than reading US newspapers. The US has done this with Russia and China for years as well. But there was a general understanding that disclosing too much was a bad idea. So, announcements of high-level officials movements were often reported after the fact or vaguely. Same thing with other information that could be coordinated. Today, we have no such restraint in the news organizations and you better believe there are people watching the news, reading newspapers and magazines as well as reading stuff on the Internet.
Can they put valuable information together? Absolutely. Would "open and transparent" be a lot more valuable to adversaries than to the people it was intended for? Maybe. That is going to be a very tough idea for most people to get their heads around.