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Cyber Attacks on US Linked to Chinese Military?
wiredog writes "Security expert Bruce Schneier is reporting on a continuing effort to penetrate US government and industry computer systems that most likely stems from the Chinese military." From the Terranet article: "The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity."
Honestly though why do many servers need to allow access from Chinese computers? Just block them at the firewall and be done with it.
I'm not sure how you can villify a Communist Dictatorship that surpresses free speech with a gun anymore then just being honest about what they are.
And the Americans are not doing the same to the Chinese?
I would have been shocked if this was not going on in both directions - in dozens of directions for that matter.
> we will just blacklist all of china traffic at the backbones
That's pretty naiive. Off the top of my head I can think of severals ways around that... modem dial long distance into another country, or buy a T-1 into a neutral country into another neutral country etc etc, you know... like how countries on our 'naughty' list buy weapons now, from USA to Great Britain to Germany to Sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East, etc.
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Uhm... I think big companies that rely heavily on Chinese imports and outsourcing services might not be too happy about that.
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It would be a naive point of view to think that it hasn't already started. It would be equally naive to assume that the U.S. is not at the forefront of such a war.
Seriously, it makes no sense to think that the U.S. government is not involved in digital warfare and espionage. The U.S. is the greatest military power in the world, especially when it comes to technology. The Internet was created there - by the military orginally.
If the U.S. government didn't take digital warfare seriously, this will without a doubt at least have changed after 9/11. The current administration is extremely militant, party with cause, and party without cause. Their ideology is based on 'first strike' principles - on elimiting potential threads as they surface. It is only logical to assume that this ideology extends to all possible fronts.
Now, who wants to bet big bucks that the United States military is not deeply involved in aggressive digital warfare at this very moment?
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
For those who think that China is a big teddy bear full of love for the world, freedom, and independence of the people we have two words to remember: Tiananmen Square.
I will never forget the images of those young people being shot at, arrested, stampeded out of the square by the Chinese military.
Their government is not warm and fuzzy and has nothing to do with basic human rights. They are fellow humans, the people of China. They deserve better than that gang of thugs in power. I wish them luck in outlasting their predecessors' mistake in choosing to empower those creeps.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Given that the way we won WWII was by throwing vast numbers of inferior equipment and troops at a nation who was more technologically advanced and had a population that was a small fraction of our own, then yes, I think we will wait this one out. You should actually look at how we won WWII before you spout.
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I think you fail to understand how intertwined global supply chains really are. If you blacklist all China tyraffic at the backbones, you'll essentially cripple a large part of the US economy as a result. Then there is the question of all that US debt China is holding.
As of today, the two countries econmonies are too intertwined for either to seriously screw with the other. Kind of an economic vversion of MAD.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
And, in the aftermath you get to see how hypocritical our government (U.S.) is when it comes to authoritarian regimes. We're more than happy to open up the gates for business with China, yet we crack down on democracies (Venezuela, Haiti) who don't fit in with our Project for the New American Century.
Forget all that "Freedom is on the march" propaganda and start looking at our REAL foreign policy.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Let's see, out of 1.3 billion people, there would be 130,000,000 people in the 90 percentile of intelligence. The US population is about 250 million. In other words, China could fill almost half of the US with very smart people. My point? I agree with you.
"I've been saying all along that China is a threat- and this is really the third front of WWIII."
"World war..." I do not think it means what you think it means.
See, when cities start getting wiped off of the face of the planet and an entire generation of young men gets decimated and then decimated again, then you get to call it a "World War III." Ask Europeans or even Chinese of the proper age group to tell you what a real world war looks like.
Very, very few people in North America have seen what a war actually looks like since the freakin' 1860's (and they had to travel to see it), which is probably why people like tossing around the word "war" without having any fucking clue what it entails ("War on Poverty," "War on Drugs," "War on Terrorism," "War on Christmas," and the silliness of calling the whole Red State vs. Blue State thing the "Second American Civil War).
Sherman said "War is Hell" and went on to aptly demonstrate that fact. This, this isn't even a hissy fit. If you have the liesure time to piss away posting on a website, it ain't war.
I have been following this for some time.
This is not the first time this story has appeared on Slashdot. The last time it did (last year, I think), it covered a person who had traced the attacks back as far as China and gave some basic information about the methods and types of attacks. Also there is some reason to think that some military systems have indeed been penetrated and such items as flight control software stolen.
My own suspicion is that you have some sort of DMZ from which these attacks are occurring. You have a number of people stationed in shifts around the clock logging into these systems (possibly remotely) and using them for the attacks. There is plenty of reason to suspect the Chinese military here. These are not defacement attempts but are pretty surgical attempts at military data theft. This means organized crime (terrorist or not) and military are your only major suspects. The military is more likely the purpetrators given not only the specific type of data being targetted but also the Chinese Gov't's general unwillingness to cooperate with an investigation.
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Actually, the last three wars we fought differently- of which we fought one to a stalemate, one we lost, and one other we won but failed to finish the job enough to avoid being back in the same place a decade later.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Let's not forget how important our information infrastructures are and how dependent we have been on computers for quite sometime.
let's also not forget that Microsoft is a corporation, so it's motivated by only one thing: profit. If they'll put in a backdoor for the US government, why not do it for other governments? They work for the highest bidder.
In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, thousands of American soldiers died in an effort to stop the threat of Chinese communism. Today, China is one of our top trading "partners". What has changed? China is still one of the worst human rights violators, and routinely abuses its neighbors (Taiwan and Tibet). In trading terms, China is probably our most abusive partner. Any project done in China must also have any related side projects completed there. China also devalues their currency, further imbalancing trade.
The China situation probably pisses me off more than any single other issue. Its an issue where both parties are on the same side; the side of profit-whoring multinationals that have no problem selling out American workers and small business and buddying up to the rights-abusing monster that is the Chinese govt.
We have a record trade deficit right now: money.cnn.com so China doesn't want to fight us, we consume way too much of their produced goods.
And we don't want to fight China, American buisnesses rely way too much on Chinese goods. On top of that, China and South Asia are among the largest emerging markets in the world... The only war both sides want is a price war.
I certainly don't think there is any Nazi/Alexander the Great/Ghengis Khan expansionist ambition on any side that could lead to a world wide conflict. After Iraq, no one in the US wants to rule anything but the good ol' USA. And while there are huge issues with basic human rights, China is gradually making a shift towards a free society, which is probably the right way to go (see the former USSR, Easter Europe, and the Balkans, for the variety of problems: economic depression, civil war, etc. that emerge with even the best intentioned political upheaval).
Taiwan could end up being a sticky issue, but neither side really wants it to result in violence.
Funny, I thought our growing debt would make a good reason to quit spending so damn much money! Of course, I'm not a greedy, slime-sucking politician either.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
RIGHT!!! Oh how you would whine if we actually did invade North Korea. Let's say we had invaded North Korea instead of Iraq, we would be in the exact same boat, except the whining would be to the tune of, "Why invade North Korea! Didn't Bill Clinton say that Iraq was the threat?"
"Chinese outnumbers all other languages in the world."
So? If you read the whole article, you'll notice that they point out that, funny thing is, the vast, vast majority of all Chinese speakers live in one place. China has always believed it is the center of the world and waited for everybody to come to them instead of, say, exporting themselves and their language. Unless you're actually going to China, you will get far more mileage with English, French or Spanish (i. e. the ones who did go out and export people and langauge).
In my own layman's opinion, the obsession with whatever flavor of Chinese dialect you're looking at is little more than a fad. Twenty years ago, "the" langauge for us to all go out and learn would have been Russian or Japanese, two other examples of isolated languages.
IMO, it makes more sense to run out and learn Portuguese. Brazil is closer to the US than China.
Although the number of victims aren't really comparable, I'd be more willing to compare Tiananmen Square to the Kent State massacre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_Massacre
If we go to war with China I think it becomes a moot point.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
OK, and then China takes all those T-Bills it's holding and says, "hello Uncle Sam, I'd like to cash these in please". See you on the soup line. The US says, "fuck you China, we won't pay". Faith in the US dollar plunges to an all-time low. See you on bread line.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You could wish their current (and continuing) administration to have learned (well, something) from the previous administrations mistakes. To say communism is outright bad is ignorant. Its like blaming God (and I know some people do) or religions for all the bad interpretations people make of them.
And as far as human rights go I don't think the US has a leg to stand on right now. Tiananmen Square like a big FUCK YOU to the world, to divergent ideologies, etc. Guantanamo Bay or the unintentional results due to the use of white phosphorus in Falluja aren't signs of a government suddently gone wild. We've been violating basic human rights for ages, we've just done it more diplomatically.
Sorry for the ramble. I just feel like for all our best intentions in time men will find means to erode high-standing ideals for a little bit of personal gain. We want so much.
Quack, quack.
First, the argument that an attack is disciplined thus it must be the national military is just plain stupid -- and I frequently agree with Bruce S.
Even then, how is this not anticipated? Governments spy on each other (and their own citizens) prolificly, even their allies. We do it, they do it. European countries and the US are constantly one-upping each other in government sponsored corporate espionage. The Internet's done nothing but created a new medium. We steal corporate and military secrets from them, and they from us. Big deal.
The fact is that this means nothing. We know how to prevent this from being a problem, we do it, and we even disseminate disinformation this way.
The Iraq boondoggle aside, countries are actually very good about researching each other. There's a level of transparency between nations that is completely hidden to the average citizen. I think that everyone understands that at some level. The problem is, of course, that the public understanding of geopolitics is quite different than that of world leaders and the intelligence community. China could be an invasion threat, or on the verge of a dramatic shift to democracy and becoming our (USA) 51st state -- but, honestly, how many people are privileged enough to have access to sufficient information to make that call? Almost certainly not you.
By avoiding transparency, governments can avoid accountability to their citizens and other nations. That lack of accountability makes people easy to assuage, makes governments appear artificially effective, etc. In the US we demand little transparency because making information available puts us at risk (so the logic goes). Thus, by simply augmenting the perception of risk (nwes about terrorists, spies, etc.), people will lower their accountability demands, enabling more flexibility for things probably not in the public interest.
Of the top 100 economic powers in the word, 52 are corporations, and 48 are countries. About 1/3rd of goods transferred over a national border are goods that don't transfer ownership because they stay within a multinational corporation that is internally transferring those goods). It seems that some good geopolitical FUD can make you richer than Croesus if you're an inside player in the game.
Second china is not an iraq or vietnam. It would kick americas butt in both a ground war and a nuclear exchange. Massive losses for the chinese sure, but so what? Not like they are going to run out.
Third russia would have a fit.
Fourth India would have a fit.
Fifth non-commercial blokkade would suit the chinese just fine. Less capatalist propaganda to filter out. It is not like South Africa were the majority of the population were against the boycotted goverment.
No it is just bash the chinese time in the media, next month it will be the EU's turn.
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"Did it ever occur to you that war may have changed,"
Ten thousand years of civilization and warfare, and the face of war has always remained the same: people killing people and breaking things en masse, wholesale slaughter. The means and methods may have changed, but the results, the aftermath has always been the same: smouldering cities and bloodsoaked soil. Are you so vain as to believe that humanity is somehow above all that now and things have magically changed in the past hundred months that haven't changed in the past hundred centuries?
And before you start pointing at 9/11, not even that qualifies. The Romans did far worse to Carthage and they didn't have airplanes or the Internet. Try finding something in Atlanta older than 150 years.
"and that there are people starving to death in America due to WWIII already?"
Any more than, say, the Great Depression? Even with the surge of population in the US since the 1930's, I'd still wager the raw numbers are higher from the '30's, and that was peacetime.
Again, you have zero sense of scale.
Starvation during wartime comes because international shipments of food are seized/sunk and domestic food sources are torched, blighted, salted, or otherwise eliminated by human violence, and everybody knows it. You sure as hell don't start talking about a freakin' obesity epidemic. Hell, look at postwar Japan, and that was even after we called off our submarine fleet.
And, again, this is something North America has not seen in almost 150 years. No rational person would even pretend this qualifies as a war.
Definitely any growing influence needs to be watched but there are "natural" forces that check anyone from rising too far. Look how scary the Japanese economy was in the 1980s -- remember movies like 'Gung Ho' that played on our fears? Here's some reasons why China will plateau before ruling the world: 1. Their main global economic value currently is cheap labor. But their standard of living is rising quickly and salaries are growing. Many, in the cities, have cars and big screen televisions. They won't be cheap for much longer -- in fact they're starting to outsource to Vietnam! 2. Their banking system is flawed, and their corporations are rife with corruption. They will experience a major economic crisis similar to the "economic flu" that hit the other Asian tiger countries. Major scandals will be unveiled, big corporations will default on loans, and the whole house of cards will fall down. 3. Political turmoil. As the social disparity increases, they will get inundated with protests and strikes like any other modern industrial country. 4. Infrastructure problems. 5. Energy and water supply problems. 6. Pollution problems. Don't mistake their transient success of five years with a prolonged dominance.
Has there ever been a responsible superpower?
Live forever, or die trying.
While I don't approve of this method of cutting corners on R&D the Chinese are doing nothing that the US hasn't done in the past and still is doing today, and not just to nations that could be a potential threat either. The USA also spies on it's own allies and that includes abusing base rights and surveillance assets, supposedly there to be used for the benefit of NATO defense, to conduct industrial espionage on other NATO nations. The US has even used these assets to commit occasional acts of economic sabotage, a famous example would be the Saudi Arab airliner deal that Boeing managed to snatch away from Airbus with Uncle Sam's help. Not that I'm complaning mind you, we Europeans are not exactly angels either and the whole Airbus mess did have two positive results. Firstly we now know that we can't even trust our friends in the USA as far as we can throw them (a lesson they are now slowly learning them selves, in reverse, so to speak) and secondly many corporations here now take communications security more seriously than the military. Judging from the way it has been chewing away at Boeing's market share Airbus certainly seems to have learned it's lesson.
The price of peace is eternal vigilance.... even your friend will stab you in the back to butter his own slice of bread.... learn the lesson, go on and get over it.
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I remember reading about how the NSA had intercepted printers going to Iraq and replaced chips inside them to use them for espionage and sabotage during the first iraq war. I am pretty certain there are lots of american and european made devices in china that have hacked hardware and software to enable the US to carry out attacks or gather intelligence. It certainly would not surprise me to find out that windows has hooks for espionage by the NSA and whatnot.
If I was the chinese I would not trust any item not made under my control. We can automatically presume the US is working very hard to spy on them and the destroy their infrastructure if they attack taiwan or us.
By the way this also goes for any country really. I bet there are devices in france and germany too. We spy on everybody and stand ready to destroy anybody who goes against us.
evil is as evil does
We're an Army-sponsored engineering research group that already worries about this. Just take a look at the China Journal of System Simulation for an amazing look at China's emerging technological dominance.
URL: http://www.china-simulation.com/esite/preview/05-0 5.htm n ew_0035.html
Graphic: http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/whats_
As the graphic says, "open strategic advantage (OSA) strategies are easy to understand, impossible to stop, and yield global strategic advantages". Or as China's books on business strategy say: "Deceive the sky, to cross the ocean."
That's a scenario that is a loser for the Chinese as well, at least according to Thomas Friedman. If our economy goes, so does theirs. It's a GOOD thing that we are entwined. This is a major factor keeping us off each other's throats.
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Yes, of course, but do you think it would have been better if the US hadn't gotten involved?
Pacifism might work against a somewhat just enemy, but against one who actually IS willing to create millions of graves it doesn't do much good.
This (entwined economies) was the reason why the major world powers in the 1910s thought that war was impossible. Didn't work then, didn't work now. Economic arguments assume rational decision makers, and no human being is entirely rational all the time.
You've probably figured this out by now, but in case you haven't gotten there yet, a vast majority of the systems and/or components of systems that make up the electronic infrastructure are made in China. If you think they are just a bunch of dummies blindly manufacturing things designed by the vastly superior minds of the west, you're kidding yourself. If anyone has outfitted the grid with backdoors to aid in future espionage efforts, its the Chinese.
The economy was much more agrarian and much less global 100 years ago.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Who are these US manufacturers of which you speak? They are gone.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I thought "War on ......" was a American euphemism for "an unsolvable problem we will futilely waste vast resources on in an ongoing and unsuccesful attempt to solve using means and methods long ago shown not to work." (Sounds like a corporate mission statement, doesn't it)
"War on Poverty," "War on Drugs," and "War on Terrorism" are perfect examples.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Sure, it's because you and everyone you know is unwilling to pay $3000 for a computer, which you would if cheap Asian parts vanished, because North Americans figure that it's a right to earn $15 an hour.
Got any hard questions?
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
An excellent point, which is why the vast majority of weapons systems used by the US are built in the US with US components. The COTS gear is another matter. The post-war situation would without a doubt be seriously screwed up, but I'd imagine in-sourcing would come back into fashion.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Then again, consider how many crappy chinese products have Americans purchased for years? Couldn't they be altered as well? And wasn't there a Simpsons episode regarding this very subject?
It's a coward that runs away when your friends are being attacked.
The U.S. did not get involved in WWII early on for political reasons having to do with the fact it was a democracy. There was no political support among the citizenry for going to help Europe fight "their war."
The United States prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was filled with many, many isolationists. A bunch of idiots who thought that since we had two big oceans on either side of us that we could just let the world do it's thing and we could do our thing and we'd not be bothered by whatever it is they chose to do. After all, we had those two big oceans isolating us from them.
They were a lot like the idiots protesting the war in Iraq now. They were just as stupid too. Brotherhood of man, workers of the world unite. Crap like that. Nowadays it is no blood for oil, workers of the world unite (yeah the old commie front is still there, just a lot quieter than they used to be, lot of folks don't want to believe they exist.)
It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to wake the people up, snap them back to reality, make them realize that there was a world out there we could not ignore.
That's when the United States got involved in the war. When all of a sudden there was support for it because people realized they'd been having stupid little dreams that could never come to be.
9/11 was a wake up call just like Pearl Harbor was. Woke a lot of people up but there are still a lot of people who don't want to wake up. They hit the snooze button and just kept dozing and having their little dreams about peace and love and no religon and everyone just doing their thing as one big happy family.
The alarm is going to ring again eventually and maybe they'll finally wake up. Those of us who are already awake will be pretty annoyed when they do wake up and tell us that they knew the alarm was going off all along and admit that they really didn't want to wake up because their dreams were so much nicer than the real world.
Spain recently got a wakeup call. It was collect, they accepted the charges and then decided they wanted to go back to sleep. They'll probably die in their sleep.
London recently got a wakeup call.
France got a wakeup call.
Australia is getting their wake up call now.
Who will get the next wake up call?