Chinese "Cyber-Attack" US Department of Commerce

Kranfer writes "The register has an article about how the Chinese have recently launched an attack against the US Department of Commerce. From the article: '...attacks originating from computer crackers largely located in China's Guangdong province are aimed at extracting sensitive information from targets such as the Commerce Department's technology export office. Security consultants and US government officials reckon the assaults have at least the tacit support of the Chinese government...' This is not the first time Chinese hackers have attempted to gain access to US Government systems."

Comments

Re:Not Chinese

[Shoten]

Well, yes and no. There are a few problems with this hypothesis; one, and the most important of them, is that attacks have been conclusively back-traced to China. And yes, the guy who did it actually broke the law in the process, but c'est la guerre, non? The event is known as "Titan Rain," and it began with a series of targeted attacks against the Department of Energy. A computer security worker, in his spare time (and a wink/nod from the FBI) counter-hacked hosts that were the source of the attacks, eventually following the trail back to mainland China. There, he saw that the logins which executed commands were being performed locally, and that the devices were not forwarding pilfered data on to other hosts but were instead the repositories of that data.

Other things involve the fact that when you see attacks from China, you usually get one of two kinds of hosts: you get a wildly unpatched Windows box that's being used as a bot, or you get a decently-secured (usually linux or *BSD) system that is doing some rather specific things to a specific target. And last of all, let's not forget that most of the seminal works on information warfare were written by Chinese military officers, and that it's no secret whatsoever that China actually does have a significant infowar capability. We have no rules of engagement that classify hacking as an act of war, so they can get away with it; what are we going to do, bomb them over it? They have the world's largest standing army, are a (increasingly) crucial economic partner, and we're already overburdened militarily with a two-front war where we've bogged down fighting insurgents. They do it because they know they can get away with it, and they're correct in that thinking.