China Says It Lacks Skills To Hack US Systems

ScentCone writes "A spokesman for China's foreign ministry says that — China being the 'developing nation' that it is — he doubts that his country has the sophistication to hack foreign systems. This in response to statements by two congressmen regarding apparent probing by China-based crackers into congressional systems for information about communication between US officials and activists in China."

Comments

step 1, hide source

[Keruo]

For talented crackers, it would be relatively easy to cover their tracks by using several compromised machines as proxies for their attack.
China has large internet user base and the average Jin would likely secure their home machine as well as average Joe across the ocean.

Re:whats more likely

[jimbobborg]

Read the fine article. Quoted from second article:

"The extent of the intrusions on Capitol Hill, which officials said began in August 2006, was unclear, although Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), whose office had four computers affected, said that other members of Congress were targeted, as well as at least one congressional committee. "They got everything," Wolf said at a news briefing, describing the attack on his office systems.

Wolf said that after one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a Chinese dissident in the Washington suburbs and took photographs of it."

Re:China lacks the skills?

[datan]

it's part of the Chinese culture. The polite way to receive a compliment is to be modest; in fact it's bad manners to receive a compliment without protest...so in this case, the Chinese foreign ministry is merely being polite

Re:South Park defense

[datan]

it's a polite way in China to receive a compliment

Re:South Park defense

[Yetihehe]

What they are answering now, comes from a culture that is very, very, very smart. Old. Intelligent.

Yeah, especially after cultural revolution (1966-76), when they effectively removed scientists from public life and science never quite reborn after this. Very smart indeed.

Re:Yeah, right

[flosofl]

Yes it was broken.

On 1 March 2005, Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger demonstrated[8] construction of two X.509 certificates with different public keys and the same MD5 hash, a demonstrably practical collision. The construction included private keys for both public keys. A few days later, Vlastimil Klima described[9] an improved algorithm, able to construct MD5 collisions in a few hours on a single notebook computer. On 18 March 2006, Klima published an algorithm[10] that can find a collision within one minute on a single notebook computer, using a method he calls tunneling.

The concern is less for password hashing than for cryptographic signatures based on MD5. It destroys one of the principles of a crypto signature: non-reputability. By being able to create an arbitrary collision, that is removed.

Here's a good site to give you an overview.