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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.
Having not read TFA but read the summary, it only says that they were working out of China. That could mean that any person in China with access to a computer and *possibly* access beyond the great firewall of China could have done it. The summary sounds like if a US hacker hacked the Chinese government it would have to be the US government and not some ordinary hacker.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So what makes China any different. Lobbyist groups have been "hacking" congress for ages.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Jebus...can we leave the OS wars out of it? Just this once?
From the line you quoted, it sounds like they had physical access to the machine to do the copying. Any and every OS will fall if you have the thing in your hands.
I have a server the size of a double CD case locked in a dark generator shed on a tiny island miles from anywhere that sits alone 9 months of the year reporting battery bank voltages to me.... Chinese hackers attempt to break into it several times a day.
The fact is, there is a metric shitload of Chinese hackers out there. Just because you think you are something special doesn't mean they are targeting you.
(of course the hacker may not be from China, they are just using a machine in China as the most recent hop.)
Suppose China were found unequivocally guilty by this congressional hearing, what kind of punishment/sanction is our pro-business government (both parties) going to impose? There'll surely be economical retaliation and Walmark are not going to like that.
Just like suppose Windows were found to be running on most of the hacked computer, is our government going to to tough enough to demand replacing all our military computers with something more secure? Not when a multi billion contractor from Redmond has anything to say about it.
This raises another point. Surely our enemies with resource (and computer resource is cheap and abundant) are going to try to hack us. Shouldn't we be more focused on securing our system: something we can do pro-actively. Instead of blaming the attacker, over whom we have to jurisdiction (or unwilling) to punish, shouldn't we punish those people who leave us vulnerable here, at home, when we are paying them shit load of tax money to secure our infrastructure? And if the infrastructure is to blame, should we blame congress?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
In any case, they had physical access to the machine, so unless you're encrypting the HDD, it's game over. Your stock Debian laptop would have been compromised as quickly as the one with Windows XP. Bastille Linux is just the same type of protection that can be had for Windows if you want or need it, and I'm guessing in this case they do want and need it. But it's not Windows' fault, and it's not Microsoft's fault, no matter how much you want that to be the case.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
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.
Bastile-Linux. Great tool. It doesn't prevent you from booting the laptop with knoppix or something of the like, then mounting the drive and dd'ing it. They should be using multi-tier'd security for any system that leaves the premises. With considerations for different types of attack vectors. Physical and virtual. JMO. Also... If they can fry the electronics in a plane with the flip of a switch why can't they make the laptops self destruct when something cracks or penetrates the case? You could easily kill anything that would of had data on it by frying it if someone tries to remove it. Or better yet... Don't carry a laptop with data on it. Get the data via some secure channel and have it armed with a TTL, so it removes itself from existance. But what do I know, all my important stuff lives on the flash drive in my pocket and its encrypted.
We have nothing on China. According to the BBC's annual poll of nations opinions of other nations influence, 90% of Chinese think China has a positive influence on the world. Ninety percent. That's not only provocative, but outrageous. That's surely similar to 1940s-era America, hardly like now, where only 56% of Americans believe that America has a positive influence on the world.
China has an unquestionable horrifying nationalism problem. This can be seen in issues such as Tibet and Taiwan. What's troubling isn't that Chinese want Tibet and Taiwan to be part of China, I can view that as acceptable. What isn't acceptable, however, are such obvious propaganda-induced lines of reasoning such as "Tibet has always been a part of China and forever will be a part of China." Not only is that false -- Tibet was its own country until China marched in there 50 years ago and took it, but that's how it works in war; winner takes all. But then the Chinese government proceeded to educate their entire 1+ billion population that, indeed, Tibet had always been a part of China, and that anyone who questioned otherwise was not Chinese and was siding with the Dalai Lama, who isn't even human.
Another Nationalism-brought issue outlined by the BBC poll is its hatred of Japan. There are only two important countries in the world that hate Japan -- China and South Korea. One might argue that it's because of Japan's war-time atrocities that they never properly atoned for. They have apologized many times, however poorly, and Japan is not elegant in international relations. That said, my argument is, East Asia was hugely and negatively affected by the Japanese Empire. China and South Korea aren't the only countries affected with horrendous atrocities. But why then, have all of the other South-East nations forgiven Japan, but China and South Korea haven't? Only 12% of Chinese carry a positive view of Japan's influence on the world -- not opinion of Japan, but opinion of the positiveness of Japan's influence on the world. Whereas in Taiwan, Japan's very popular culturally, even though many elderly people still speak Japanese from being forced to learn it during occupation!
And my last argument -- Anti-Anti-Chinese protests? VIOLENT Anti-Anti-Chinese protests, with prevalent stalking and death threats of anyone that criticized China? C'mon, that's pitiful.
And to any Chinese that might be reading this, my message would be that there's nothing wrong with being proud to be Chinese. There's nothing wrong with wanting the Chinese people to be united and patriotic. But people and government are separate. Just because you're Chinese doesn't mean you have to defend your government for no other reason than that it's my government, just how Americans don't have to defend President Bush just because he's my President. Nationalism is good in small doses for the morale of a country, but in large quantities like currently present in China, war is almost certainly inevitable. Think about the nationalism of 1940s America, 1940s Japan, 1940s Nazi Germany (hah, Godwin's law strikes again!). Unchecked Nationalism only brings horror and foolish decisions, all for the sake of being Chinese, or being American, or being Japanese, or being German.