Slashdot Mirror
The Secret China-U.S. Hacking War?
bored-at-IETF-ntp-session writes "In an article at eWeek Larry Seltzer examines the supposed hacking war between the US and China. He surmises 'Even if you can't prove that the government was involved ... it still bears some responsibility'. He quotes Gadi Evron who advised the Estonians during the Russian attacks. 'I can confirm targeted attacks with sophisticated technologies have been launched against obvious enemies of China ... Who is behind these attacks can't be easily said, but it can be an American cyber-criminal, a Nigerian spammer or the Chinese themselves.' Seltzer concluded 'It's just another espionage tool, and no more or less moral than others we've used in the past.'" This a subject we've also previously discussed.
Fixed that for you.
Trolling is a art,
I can confirm this. I work for the department of defense, and we get port sweeps every day coming from china.
Well, isn't this a surprise. The USA (and US media) is pointing fingers at an outside force for causing internal problems. Sure, it probably happens (that people in china attack american networks) ... but people all over the world do the same. Why target china? well... the US economy is in trouble, and china is economically booming.
Then again, both Hillary and Obama have said they'd renegotiate NAFTA if elected (and basically blaming canada and mexico for their problems) - which is already skewed in the favor of america - to fix their domestic problems.
And engages in no similar practices.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
WTF, Batman?! If we've done this one already, and you know that well enough to put it in the initial summary, then what's the frackin point? Since when did "piling-on" become "News That Matters?"
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Note that this wasn't a "hacking war," and it wasn't a "Russian attack". It was a 20-year old Estonian kid with a botnet. More details here
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It will indeed. Espionage is hardly immoral, when done by countries vs. one another. But, it is immoral to allow the collateral damage to get too high, to sweep innocent people into the fray, etc.
All science requires the articles of faith that the world makes sense, will continue to behave in the future the same as in the past, we can trust our senses/are not brains within jars, etc. But you are correct that most other articles of faith are orthoginal to science.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well unlike religion and science, espionage are quite tangled. Ostensibly, in the case of national security, one undertakes espionage as part of a larger effort to preserve a morality. Espionage is a security measure against threats to a certain group's morality. Most would agree that there is at least some consideration due when discussing the morality of espionage "Semantic gymnastics" aside, it's pretty hard to disentangle espionage from morality in any useful way.
I got a catholic block.
They are looking for weaknesses in our defenses against melamine-free wheat gluten, procedures for testing toys for lead paint, and new marketing strategies to get more teenage girls mesmerized by Hello Kitty.
I'm tired of the US govt. spying on me, i constantly get scanned by US IP's.
That's of course not the case, but I don't think the issue of morality within espionage is remotely cut-and-dry.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
1) Of course there is a hacking war going on! And this is news?
...
2) Blaming "China" is like blaming "America". I mean. How stupid is
oh
they do?
on Slashdot??
never mind
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
It should be noted (search for it if you don't believe me) that these so-called russian attacks on estonia were actually done by an estonian teenager. Kind of makes me doubt that expert's expertness.
Fleur de Sel
Attacks by the Chinese are known to have occurred for at least 10 years. The first amateurish and easily traced attacks were against a particular US based "free Tibet" web site owned by a Brit, and followed by attacks on other sites of a similar nature. Within weeks the same IP range (clearly within the Chinese ministry of defense) was used to breach a mail relay at a US naval installation in Virginia. (To be fair to the Navy, the system was a relic with the then still common non-closed relay, and was a purely administrative system, not part of anything security or defense-sensitive). The reports were publicly released and largely ignored, as have been some that followed. The little public attention waned as rapidly as it tends to for larger events that fall out of the news over time. I suspect escalation, probably by both sides, occurred after attention fell off, taking advantage of that and adding expert spoofing to insure that most would not be able to consider further reports reliable.
/. questions was recruiting for. It's already in progress. I'd enjoy the hell out of serving again, and being able to do so without having to put on a uniform. I'd especially enjoy it when I found that the majority of "combatants" were somewhere below my own level of expertise, though somewhat higher than script kiddies -- interesting but not too frustrating.
If I were going to conduct surgical attacks against a government from within a large IP block, I'd allow others with less ambitious nasty plans to use it, and hide my activities within the flood from them, like hiding an artillery attack within a thunderstorm. I have little doubt that there are "Nigerian spammers" and such using Chinese machines. That doesn't preclude their government doing it -- to my mind it indicates the probability.
And they wouldn't want reports to be entirely absent either. Taking over or subverting the infrastructure that carries content is as much a part of psychological warfare as is the content itself. Subversion of the medium is also the message, and that must become known to the system's owners and their allies. It causes mistrust in the system, its owners, and any messages to come from them. The general public wouldn't care or pay attention, but those who did care would get the intended message. And you have.
This is the war that the General who recently answered
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
My biggest expenses are:
1) Taxes (35%)
2) Rent (17%)
3) Food (11%)
4) Tythe (10%)
5) Transportation (7%)
6) Student Loans (7%)
7) Therapy (6%)
6) Bills (4%)
7) Other stuff (3%)
Most of the stuff I buy from china comes from the "other stuff" department, which is my smallest expense. I think this is also a pretty typical for other Americans. I don't think it's fair to say that I or people like me waste "all their money on useless shipt that they hardly ever use and dont really need."
A bigger contributor to the trade deficit is China's deliberate manipulation of their currency. Measured in nominal dollars, the GDP of china is only about $2.5 trillion, but at purchasing power parity with US prices, it's $10 trillion. That's means that a dollar is worth four times as much in china as it is in the US. It's no wonder people chose to manufacture things in China.
Not to play devil's advocate, but do we know it is the Chinese hacking the U.S.'s data networks?
One of the comments above mentioned that "just mentioning the words 'network security' in China can land you a lot of jail time." If this is correct, then it seems to me that there are probably a lot of unsecured networks and hosts in China. If that is the case, then how do we know that it is really the Chinese who are trying to hack DoD and business networks rather than some thirteen year old script kiddie in Hackensack who just happened to find a way into a computer in some backwater school in China?
Just because you are seeing hits from Chinese IP addresses doesn't mean the Chinese are behind it. The real question is "how deep does the rabbit hole go?" Unfortunately, there isn't really any way to know unless you hack the originating IP(s) yourself.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?