Slashdot Mirror
China's Cyber-Militia
D. J. Keenan notes that the cover story of the current issue of National Journal reports in depth on China's cyber-aggression against US targets in the government, military, and business. We have discussed China's actions on numerous occasions over the years. The news in this report is the suggestion that Chinese cyber-attackers may have been involved in major power outages in the US. "Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of US companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to US government officials and computer-security experts..."
"A computer virus" is as close as this article came to the reason power companies are so wide open to any aggressor.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Now I know the truth- it was the Chinese cyber-militia!
Are vital parts of power plants connected to The Internet? Why?
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
Wow, has professional writing ever gone downhill. Ever heard of a period?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It is a long article, but worth reading. The suspicion of Chinese involvement in two major U.S. power outages is extremely worrying. Following are quotes on related aspects.
People need to communicate. There is no place to
draw a line, cutting off more-vital parts from the
less-vital parts.
There mechanical protection systems, so you won't
be making meltdowns over the net.
China isn't the only country hacking US interests so whats the big deal here? I'm pretty sure we have just as many hackers hacking into not only Chinese systems, but probably every country out there that doesn't align with our interests.
This just seems like more propaganda.Why must either the chinese government or the organization involved continuously act so amorally in the pursuit of profit (monetary or otherwise) despite the terrible impact it has on others and ignore any 'outsiders' outcry against their actions.
oh...wait...familiar that.....sounds like a good chunk of humanity.
Not saying its not wrong, just putting a perspective stick in the spokes.
Ice Cream has no bones.
From now on every instance of government stupidity and incompetence will be blamed on Chinese Hackers. Well, maybe the 13 year old hacker in his parent's basement is finally safe.
The article mentions large scale government, military and industry intrusions. They also mention criminal gangs and others besides China as those responsible.
This is an odd issue that gives neo-conservatives fits. They like trading with China, so they don't like hearing old school anti-Communist and human rights complaints. They place the interests of large American companies above those of American people, so they don't like hearing bad things about Microsoft. This leads to a large scale head in sand act.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
It would be sweet revenge if they suddenly started seeing their government websites reporting "hacked by Tibet"
If you run Windows on a cable modem or DSL, there's a good chance your computer is part of a botnet.
When will we finally admit that the Chinese government declared war on us some 20 years ago? Now we are seeing the fruits of the action. Our infrastructure is more vulnerable to the Chinese than to Al Queda, they have been stealing key nuclear and missile technologies, we can't make portions of OUR key IT infrastructure, without Chinese products...the list goes on.
If you go to any US port, you will find that almost every single shipping container in almost every US port is loaded and moved with a container crane made in China. ZPMC has something approaching a monopoly on container handling equipment. We can't even build the infrastructure to participate in the world economy independently anymore.
Unfortunately, the actions of the PRC government do a grave disservice to the Chinese people, who I'm sure would love to interact with the rest of the world in a fair (possibly democratic) way.
What kind of un-patched Windows crap is running the power grid?
Of course the attackers are guilty; but that doesn't excuse foolish security practices. Nevermind bad security on the end-point, or in the software. It seems like the power company, with all its rights-of-way, shouldn't even have to route over the public network. Routing over a private network would provide physical security. Breaking into that requires putting your actual body at the point of attack. Since the power company came before the Internet, I would have thought they had a private network of some kind in place already, or close cooperation with telcos. I guess not.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
China is just doing exactly what the US, Russia, England, and every other nation is doing, and has done for hundreds of years, which is stealing each others secrets...
And the recent power outages are due to badly maintained and or out of date hardware thats not very fault tolerant.
I might have my cynical head on though.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military
Can they prove that? This sounds like regular old corporate espionage -- nothing unusual or even foreign there. Is xenophobia starting to take hold, or are those statements substantiated? No time to RTFA.
The submitter quotes the most frightening parts of the article and our current "trade partner" China is well positioned to spy. We trust them to make equipment and non free software like Cisco routere has proved itself impossible to check.
Still, most of the hacks are common and anyone could do it. Time and time again we read about autopropagating botnets for Windows and how they cover large parts of the internet. When that system is used on corporate and government desktops, anyone can exploit it.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
You mean kind of like we did with Cuba (minus the EMP bit)? I mean, that works really well, right? Or Iraq? Embargo the heck out of them, and sooner or later those pissed off commoners will throw off their shackels!!
right?
So, how do you seriously get to the point where a couple of blackouts and some economic competition justifies bombing around 1 billion people because you're paying too much for gas? Do you kick puppies for training, or are you just born that much of an asshole naturally?
at least the US governement learned from Billy or is that the Caine example is till around! or the Vietnamese Canon boat attack on US ships or the WTC attack 911 so the next to blame is not terrorists but China who is the next scapegoat - framed or not! who trusts the US??
Because when you do that your fat american ass will be sad as all your shit is made in china for a reason - you're expensive and incompetent. Tough luck, lardy.
World War 3 will start with a conflict with China, not these arabs hiding in caves.
Neither government is stupid enough to ever fight each other. In today's modern global economy, the entire world's economy would go to shit if the US and China went to war.
The only front that a war with China will take place on is the digital front.
...China gets rid of their nuclear weapons.
Till then, they get to do as they please, same as any nuclear-armed country.
I wanted to have Firefox installed and use it instead of Internet Explorer 6 (yes, 6), but it is against regulations to have it installed these days.
Clearly military security is reactive, as opposed to proactive -- sad, but true.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
What are we going to do to China? Sanctions? Trade Tariffs? Probably just a "stern speech"
Even if it is Chinese Government sponsored hackers, the american people still want their cheap goods.
Just like most americans we care more about the price of gas, than what type of government is in Iraq.
We want fresh fruit picked by illegal immigrants who have no healthcare.
We want cheap power, but as long as the nuclear power plant is built in someone elses backyard.
"gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast"
Solution is, don't put your SCADA units on the Internet. And even if this were true the more likely explanation is that they didn't have enough spare capacity.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Wow. Umm. You seriously believe this? That the US can anonymously EMP their data centers? That the US can just stop buying Chinese goods (check out a Walmart - almost everything there is from China)? That we can bomb them back to the stone age without getting hit by at least as much in return? That the Chinese really would respond to outside pressure by turning on their government?
You are clueless and naive to a degree that is both astounding and frightening. Good job.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States"
.. A malfunctioning alarm system may have played a big role in the outage Dan Verton Nov 20 2003"
No, what really happened was the grid was overloaded and the SQL virus was playing havoc with connectivity, then a tree fell over and tripped out a line, which spread in a domino effect all the way to Canada. A similar virus tripped out the control system in a Nuclear power plant.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080531_6948.php
"During the hour before the Aug. 14 blackout, engineers in the control center of an Ohio utility struggled to figure out why transmission lines were failing and complained that a computer failure was making it difficult to determine what was going on, transcripts of telephone communications released Wednesday show"
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/09/60285
"Software failure cited in August blackout investigation
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/2003/in200314.pdf
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/recovery/story/0,10801,87400,00.html
davecb5620@gmail.com
I never realized the severity of these articles until a couple months ago my boss noticed someone from a Chinese i.p. trying to get root access to our Linux server. Fortunately they didn't get in but it did make these articles a lot more real for me, we're just a small software company and even we were targeted.
It sounds like China is saying that they are involved in our power grid going down when they did not do anything. It's our poor grid setup that took it down.
The answer is to use portable firefox, and then you don't have to install it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
The concept of M.A.D. is what is keep the world in one piece, and not a giant puddle of radioactive sludge. Thanks to modern intelligence tech, all countries capable of launching ICBMs are also capable of knowing when OTHER ICBMs are launched, within minutes. If one gets launch, then other countries will launch retaliatory strikes, and eventually, EVERYONE will launch their weapons, hoping to at least destroy the enemy before they are destroyed themselves.
China is a threat to us. They have enough nuclear warheads to pepper every population center with deliciously lethal Uranium goodness, and they can launch theirs five to ten minutes after we launch ours. Considering that an ICBM would take twenty to forty five minutes to travel to its intended target, that's more than enough reaction time. That's why we buy their cheap shit, take their insults and attacks, and let the Communist thing slide.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You do know that the Great Firewall is not, in fact, a NAT? It's just a simple filtering service applied on the master gateways to the outside world. It does proxy DNS, but that's it; all other packets are either passed through unchanged or blocked entirely, depending on the firewall policy.
Go look at the Wikipedia article; it's got a reasonable amount of technical information.
Yep, These bozos were banging away at my sshd process for weeks until I changed the port sshd listens on. Now, I change it every months or so and alert the people who need to login into these servers that the port has changed.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
...in preventing global wars, but I fear it is going to end up the same as our efforts to prevent all forest fires. The population grows and grows, and disputes like this little thing mount and mount, until a huge war/fire destroys everything.
M.A.D. just squashes down the desire to slaughter each other by the millions. Eventually it's going to pop back out of the box with a vengence.
This is fantastic news, and I can't thank China enough for these attacks. The fact is, vulnerabilities in our systems exist whether they are under attack or not. These attacks should serve as a wake up call and lead to security being taken much more seriously. Can you imagine if these weaknesses were left open and were exploited by terrorists, or by some country we find ourselves at war with in the future?
I've often scoffed at the seemingly obtuse propaganda used by communist nations in their media, to be fair, usa has plenty propaganda too, but this is just laughable, if you read about the North East blackout, you'll see that a bug in a Unix based system was primarily responsible for the failure of the electricity infrastructure to react when it should have.
Now, if I was a Chinese spy, I'd infiltrate General Electric, install a bug in the operating software responsible for the control of the energy distribution network, wait till those dumb ol americans had got complacent and then, for no strategic advantage whatsoever, cripple their energy distribution network, and then laugh my black communist heart out.
prepare the survey weasels.
Ummm. China's firewall is not NAT, and is in fact pretty much transparent. In fact it works the same way SandVine does with BitTorrent: it forges RST packets to both ends.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The Chinese 'cyber-militia' has a name. It is called the 'Red Hacker Army'. Google them up. From what I have read they were formed in 1998, immediately after China was given 'Most Favored Nation' status by the Clinton administration. Way to go Clinton Cult. The Red Hacker Army has always been funded by the Chinese communist government and are featured frequently, by name, in public Chinese newspapers. Their published exploits are followed and cheered by many Chinese citizens. Remember that the next time you buy Chinese at Wal-Mart etc.
:-P
Meanwhile, back in the USA, the military will only admit exploits by the RHA starting in 2003. And only this year have they begun publicly disclosed counter measures against these attacks that have been going on for 10 years. Way to go Bush League.
I have read comments that the military would not be stupid enough to make secret information accessible via the Internet. Um, sure. Right.
And that's why the military was ordered last year to begin migration to Macintosh Internet client and server computers. Yup. Someone over there managed to figure out which commercial OS is the single LEAST secure on the Internet. It's you know who...
For about 40 years now all kinds of utility companies have wiped their collective backsides with the idea that any kind of information processing system that has any kind of actuator needs to be thoroughly secured. After all, when was the last time you casually strolled into a waterworks or a power plant? All those things are locked down, if not guarded.
Has it come to the point that without an "enemy" we cannot bring ourselves to put decent security all IT equipment connected to public utility companies that has actuators?
Ah well ... I guess that if even the military can't be bothered to maintain elementary password discipline across their IT installations no-one else can.
...cut out the multi-billion dollar toy trade and China's toast. Are you on glue?From this site it lists 2007 total imports from China at 321.5 b$, Imports of "toys and games" as 26.1 b$. While significant, I really don't think an 8% change in China->US imports is going to make China close up shop. (This leaves aside the ridiculousness of getting consumers and businesses to collectively say "We're willing to do without or pay more just to shave a few percent off of China's trade." Good luck.)
As far as the EMP nonsense is concerned, it's possible that such a thing could be done without the Chinese having enough evidence to bring the US to court, but do you really think they wouldn't be able to gather enough evidence to consider that the likely origin and be able to retaliate in kind? Hell, if it's that that easy to avoid being legally busted, they might just do the same in Tokyo or Moscow as well, on the outside chance it was them. I suspect they would more or less ignore it, though. Anything that small (costing a few tens or hundreds of million, or whatever, and causing slight, temporary destabilization) probably wouldn't be worth bothering with in any publicly noticeable way. Maybe an excuse to disappear a few more dissidents, but that's about all that would reach the public radar.
Melt all the lead before it reaches our shores.
Bite me
The submitter writes as if these things were solid facts written in stone, whereas the fact is that nobody really knows. Sadly, building on what "intelligence" comes out of CIA just isn't feasible, as the arguments for the war in Iraq amply demonstrate. SO, the power outages "may have been caused by hackers" or something; or they may have been caused by something else. We rely heavily on advanced technology, which is a bit like balancing on a knifes edge - it is bound to go wrong from time to time, sometimes massively so, especially when stiff competition makes funding for maintenance less abundant.
Apart from that, it isn't exactly difficult to break in to this kind of system - in the past we have seen hackers walk all over the place where they aren't supposed to have been. If script kiddies can do it, is isn't surprising if higly trained miltary personnel can do it too.
But I sincerely doubt that they would leave lots of traces and clues lying around for the more paranoid factions on slashdot to play with. Script-kiddies, yes, but if you are professional, whether criminal or some foreign government, you don't just blunder stupidly in and trigger alarms, or leave your droppings all over the place.
I can see how this kind of nonsense is politically useful. Hasn't the American public caught on to this yet?
Oh wait...
Funnily enough, that's what everyone in Europe was saying in 1913.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Forget batteries, we need cars that run on fucking idiots. Slashdot has shown me that that's something we'll never run out of, cuz we got plenty here. (Of which you're just one example.)
Funnily enough, that's what everyone in Europe was saying in 1913.
1934 as well. The problem is that when at least 1 country has decided to fight, it will happen. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq on false pretenses. Many did not reason it out beforehand because of 9/11. Yet, the same thing will happen in China. Even now, China is gearing up for war to take Taiwan. They have a number of new nuke subs and are building at a MUCH faster rate than they admit to. These are designed to park off of japan, south korea, and USA to launch nukes. They are indending to threaten US interests when they want to take over Taiwan. Sadly, with US so involved in an iraqi occupation, we will almost certainly not have the ability to stop this BEFORE it gets started.
One of Americas big advantage is that we were the big kid on the block. But we were expected to use this force WISELY. W. has shown the world that it only takes one idiot to do otherwise. IOW, when China decides to go after Taiwan, many (mostly 3rd world countries ) will cheer for China. Others will sit on the sideline (mostly EU) and wait to pick apart the carcass.
Chinese do what US services do since a long time. The US eavesdrops on the world and by Google steers the way people view the world. Echelon serves US ( GB & NZ too ) military, secret services, and companies. Why do you wonder. I bet Cisco has a bootloader for US services in all Cisco routers. ( like Xerox built a camera in photocopying machines for the Eastblock )
How is the security on the machines in China? Another way to look at it is that China can be a fat target for bot herding, etc. Just because a connection comes in from China, doesn't mean that it didn't originate from the States.
Do you have references to support that statement? Even if thats what people did think, the economy in WW1 and WW2 is no where near as intertwined as it is today. There are so many American companies in China and vice versa. Billions if not trillions would be lost from both sides if the US and China went to war with each other.
"I suspect, as the system went down, the PLA hacker said something like, 'Oops, my bad,' in Chinese." haha had to post it
the article alludes to misinformation by the US government... tall trees in ohio and a computer virus were blamed. what is the real truth, and would we ever be able to tell? i agree that a 13 yo script kid could probably pull off the same (depending on the actual circumstances), so how would we ever know?
General Lord, Commander of AFCYBER, has gone on record repeatedly accusing the Chinese PLA of large-scale military and economic hacking. The US is never going to present proof, but Lord has more weight than a journalist, beltway consultant or slashdotter. Search on 'General William Lord' && 'China'.
You mean, sit it out for the first half of the war while our main rivals for world domination blow the hell out of each other, quietly take over all their markets and business interests overseas, and then get involved late on and claim all the credit and a major say in the post-war settlement?
Interesting idea. Sounds good, actually. Might work very well. Has it ever been tried before, do you know?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
maybe next time levy breaks around New Orleans, the government can blame Chinese for that? I'm amazed by how people here who usually don't trust the federal government, seem to jump to believe what CIA tell you guys this time. Remember slam dunk WMD?