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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."
Take, for example this story which includes the quote:
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 common rules of war one of which is cutting off an enemy's supply line ASAP to reduce their cone of influence. A pre-emptive move to "test the waters" of U.S. security by China would not surprise me.
My work here is dung.
Does this sound like another blame game when something bad happens in USA? If they have already traced the source and still couldn't fend it off, I don't know what they would do next, calling President Hu?
These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization
Does this rhyme with "Space exploration is both demanding and dangerous. No other nations could do this if they did not have a space shuttle".
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
This was brought up on my local SAGE mailing list earlier. Someone brought up the good point: Aren't there an awful lot of news stories recently (heck, there've been three on /. in the past few days) villianizing China? Almost as if some large government- or media-induced program is going on to remind us how Evil they are and influence the collective consciousness to be in favor of breaking off relations with the most populous nation on Earth? (Or, to some extreme, treating them like our last Axis of Evil?)
Does this, combined with the Air Force's new mission statement, constitute an Act of War?
Just ask anyone involved in the free Tibet movement or any of the ISP's that host websites with the words free Tibet, they used to get massive attacks from DOS right through to serious and well planned attempts to hack these sites. Spent an entire week assisting the fending off of one of these and having to rebuild a server after the attack got through with it.
Crying "Peace" - what purpose can it possibly serve to alert the media that attempts are being made? Who are the terrorists: Those attempting entry, or those publicizing the attempts? Or is some group setting up an attempt at justifying some potential action?
Peace, please.
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While I agree with the gist of what you're saying, my firewall logs are constantly filled with hack attempts originating from our Chinese cyber-neighbors. What I'd be interested to know is whether these are concentrated attacks (most do not seem to be) or whether China's tenancy towards software piracy has become a problem for them. Would it surprise anyone if many widely-circulated, Chinese-pirated copies of Windows XP were pre-infected with trojan rootkits? In that case the botnets would be deployed from the moment the OS was installed. That being said, the responsibility ultimately lies with them either way.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
I have been worried for a long time about the apparent naivete of the U.S. government and military regarding the Chinese.
The Chinese government and military are extremely savvy so long as they are not blinded by their communist dogma. When it comes to trade, information, spying, and weapons technology, they understand the reality that those who play fair lose.
If you are a businessman, have no illusions that your papers and files are safe in your hotel room in China. There have been documented cases of government-sponsored spies following businessmen and bugging or entering their hotel rooms to scour their belongings for useful trade secrets and intellectual property.
We can see clearly that they are pursuing a strategy of mercantilism in trade, to our great disadvantage, thanks to the cluelessness of free-traders in Congress and the White House.
Who can doubt that the same issues exist with regard to sensitive military information? The Chinese sponsor students to come to the U.S. with the express goal sometimes of infiltrating research staffs and supplying tech info back to China. The same surely occurs with U.S. government and military employees, although the screening is more thorough.
In my opinion, the CHinese government would see hacking U.S. government or military sites as a requirement for successful international competition. Hopefully, the NSA and others like them are on top of the problem. I don't doubt, though, that they have gained access to lots of systems on the lower end of the confidentiality spectrum.
It needs to be impressed on people in government, military, and intelligence work, that the Chinese are playing one mean game of chess in everything they do vis-a-vis the U.S. Their sense of time spans centuries and millennia rather than decades. Any suspicious activity on their part needs to be treated with the greatest skepticism by our guys, rather than with apathy or giving them the benefit of the doubt...
It's never hack from home. Now, even if the Chinese are actively trying to .gov or .mil. I'm pretty sure so called
hack us, (why not, I am sure it's not just them and I'll bet money we are doing
it too), why would they source an attack from their primary location? Even if
the "attacks" are coming from there, that doesn't mean it's the Chinese. It
could be an American or British kid who took over a box there. And I gotta
tell you, if it were me, I would bounce my traffic around the world twice
before I even took a look at a
"military trained" hackers backed by the Chinese government could and would
have far more resources and could cover their tracks better than that. If it
were me, I would have all the attacks sourced from Britian or Iserail, or some
other friendly US ally. Color me suspicious.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
American corporations will not stand for being refused entry to a market encompassing a sixth of the world's population. This pressure began to build in the seventies and has only increased. This is the determining factor in all US/China dialogue.
illegitimii non ingravare
well, lessee. I work for a global company. We happen to have offices and plants in china. Those offices are connected directly to the rest of our WAN via IPSec. I'm sure we are part of the majority of American companies in this respect. Do you really think the government that favors corporations over individuals is going to cut those corporations off?
Consider going to Bejing, Shanghai or Hong Kong.
Beijing is hardly a futuristic city (not really sure why you included that one. It's a beautiful city, but it hardly fits in with the other two). Hong Kong's prosperity is completely and absolutely the result of the British rule and law, and it has diminished since the takeover.
If you go to Shanghai you should try the sooper high speed mag-lev train.
One thing about a statist economy is that you can put billions towards really dumb money sinks, all to get gullible citizens and tourists to proclaim about how futuristic it is. I hear Brazilia in Brazil is a real futuristic city as well.
I was really surprised by the whole energy of the place. When I went to McDonalds and they didn't have my food immediately, they said no problem we will find you and bring it to you when its ready. 2 min latter I had my fries. This particular McDonald's had around 30 registers all open. They said that they served 6000 lunches everyday -- just nuts. You won't find any fast food resturant in the US that can manage that volume and provide good service too.
You're impressed that they brought your food to you? Wow, your opinion really needs to be considered suspect. Fastfood restaurants everywhere bring food to you.
Regarding the McDonalds being big --- if that's your measure of prosperity... That's like saying that a town is a great town because they have the largest Walmart. I'm going to have to presume that you're being sarcastic.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
Ah, good old fear mongering and ignorant economics. Ignoring the fact that China isn't a big financer of debt (and hasn't been for some time), countries don't buy bonds because they're benevolent - they do it for their own best interest. In the case of China they buy up US $ (and formerly bonds) to prop up the dollar, which keeps the yuan undervalued and serves China.
Secondly, if China did something (ignoring that they couldn't do anything that could be rapidly circumvented) they would punish the US $, depreciating their own holdings in US bonds (most of which can't be cashed in for years and decades. Boy, win win!
Idiots that don't have the slightest clue about economics, and that are wide-eyed about isolated advantages (OMG! I hear that North Korea has gigantic pyramid towers! They must be super first world!) should just keep their ignorance to themselves. China is eventually joining the ranks of the first world, and will soon earn some "problems" like citizens that don't like being poisoned by the air and water, and who like some rights, but this pissy nonsense about how the US is doomed reeks of ignorance.