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Chinese Government Accused of Hacking Congress
Alotau writes "Chinese hacking is getting some serious Congressional attention. Two House members said Wednesday their Capitol Hill computers, containing information about political dissidents from around the world, have been hacked by sources apparently working out of China. Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf says four of his computers were hacked. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith says two of his computers were compromised in December 2006 and March 2007. The two lawmakers are longtime critics of China's record on human rights."
The U.S. makes a lot of money off doing business with China, something like $386 billion in 2007. Retailers like Walmart and Target, manufacturers of every description, and shippers all have a huge stake in U.S.-China trade, even though China enjoys a growing surplus with the U.S.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that some mischievous hacking of Congressional computers is overlooked by the people who are supposed to care about such things. Where it gets more serious is the hacking of Pentagon systems that seems to be originating from sites in China.
China's government today is trying to juggle a growing nationalism among younger Chinese, a nationalism that is not friendly toward the West and the U.S. in particular, despite our close economic ties. They have fostered a hostile attitude toward the U.S. through years of propaganda, and this, too, the Americans have ignored in the interests of making money.
It will be interesting to see what happens come the day that China's huge internal market is affluent enough and their technology level high enough that they no longer need the U.S. as either a customer or investor. But in the meantime, it would be advisable for these Congressmen and other officials like Carlos Gutierrez (whose laptop was compromised during a trip to Beijing) to switch away from easily hacked systems like Microsoft Windows, and maybe keep their systems offline or only on a secured and firewalled intranet.
I also think that the U.S. government should not be using home computers like Dells running Windows. The hardware components are largely manufactured in China these days and who knows what evil back doors might be implanted in ROMs, akin to the compromised printers that were shipped to Iraq from the U.S. in the pre-Gulf War days.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I work at a place that is routinely attacked. As someone else noted there's a load of hackers in china, most script kiddies, but when you work at a nice juicy target you get thousands more hits. Where I work I've watched the hack attempts come in and regardless of other posts saying "Oh, China's actual government would be more careful", most of the time they are pretty brazen, easily traceable and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. We tried to run it up the chain once and after a lot of complaining we got sat down and told:
"Even if we confront someone from the Chinese government they'll just look at us and deny it."
but we have the logs.
"They'll say we faked them."
but we'll let them pull the logs themselves.
"They'll say that we are staging the attacks to frame the chinese."
I didn't have a response to this.
"We've done this before. Don't feel bad. Everyone who gets assigned to monitoring thinks they will be the first person to prove the chinese government is allowing its employees to target us. You get used to it after a while. Next year come to the import meeting and we'll let you hear how we are obviously setting up insecure servers just to tempt moral citizens to hack us." said the PHB.
George Bush and his crew of incompetence have NOTHING on the chinese when it comes to flat out lying, ignoring evidence, and blaming the target of the attacks.
If you think SE Asians are not still pissed at the Japanese, talk to older Filipinos sometime. You'll get an earful. Of course people in SE Asia are not as emotional about the Japanese in WW2 - other than the Philippines, SE Asia was relatively untouched compared to northeast Asia. Taiwan had already been fully occupied by Japan for 50 years prior to the war, so most of the populace had been pacified and assimilated by then (my Taiwanese in-laws can speak Japanese much better than Taiwanese).
Japan is not just culturally popular in Taiwan. Its culture is a main driving force all over East Asia, without exception. Japan's plan to wait it out has worked the way it was supposed to - the older people who lived through or have heard about the war are dead or are very old. Young people today hold no such grudges, and slurp up Totoro stuffed animals just as well.
I don't see why it's surprising that Chinese and Koreans are still sore about Japan. To this day, Japan's high-ranking officials have paid both personal and state visits to shrines containing memorials to convicted WW2 war criminals. If a German chancellor was to humbly visit Hitler's birthplace, that would certainly be seen as an unspeakable act. If Nazi Germany was in power today, would you also suggest the Jews of the world to "forgive" them as well?
The interesting thing is - the latest round of negative feelings toward Japan was not instigated by the Chinese government (although they certainly didn't work very hard to calm their citizens). Conversely, the Chinese government would rather not stir up any raw feelings because Japan is now a much more integral trading partner. Ironically, it was the freedom of information which let the average Chinese read about these war criminal shrine visits in Japan, or when naive Westerners shoot their mouths off about China.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.