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China Denies Role In US Grid Hacks
Slatterz writes "The Chinese government is denying any involvement in the reported infiltration of US electric grid systems. Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu as saying that any sort of involvement from China in the incident 'doesn't exist at all.' The denial follows a report in the Wall Street Journal which claimed that agents from China and Russia along with several other countries had infiltrated the computer systems charged with managing electricity in the US and left behind software payloads which could be used to control or disable electric grids in the US."
Bruce Schneier is skeptical about the whole story.
Either they did it and aren't telling (would we?) or these are simple hackers like in Russia, the Ukraine, or even here. Or they're part of the mob.
This assumption that it must have been committed by the government is unfounded; though I would not be surprised at all. Wouldn't we if we got the shot?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Homer Simpson did it as he so dumb and china is just a cover story. Also mr burns is at flat as he is to cheap to upgrade from windows 98 / nt 4.
This is code for "Israel".
If they are going to turn off the power while I'm trying to watch "Ow, My Balls" on Fox or if my government successfully gets me to believe that, I am going to vote for whoever will blow them back to the stone age.
If the US Gov did it to China, China would have a nice chat with the US ambassador and use that as ammo in the next round of negotiations (trade/military) etc.
Same for the other way round.
And if it were really serious, it'll be more like "Stop that or else!".
So clearly it isn't anything serious.
Most of this "China Bogeyman" stuff is just some political posturing or "smoke and mirrors" for some USA entity's benefit.
Just some distraction from the real issues.
but could it be possible that for once, we're not under constant attack from enemy nations and have nothing to really fear?
the last time we cringed in terror at another country as a pretext for invasion, it turned out they were guilty of a lot less than we
originally conjectured.
if china were hacking into our powerplants and infrastructure, what purpose would it seriously serve? china manufactures a bulk of american goods, and holds a bulk of american debt.
we are an economic interest, so one could argue harm to us is harm to china.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
They got framed by the Russians. ;)
Our so-called leaders are looking to destroy the current free-speech internet...i'd look to them first before any other country.
I wish my country's government (UK) was anywhere near that technically adept...
The solution is to take computer systems charged with managing electricity off the Internet
(Routers & Switches) installed at these locations (Plus the DOD, FBI etc) are manufactured in China I'm surprised they'd even bother with something like this bearing in mind they can probably already read Obama's email and listen to most of his phone calls. If they did do it it was probably just a proof of concept or a shot over the bows.
Nil illegitimi carborundum
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
... like Chi.com imported drywall, it leaves a stink even when it clears inspection.
Schneier is a computer security expert, not a geo-strategist, and he was wrong about Iran's lost connectivity a few months ago when we all discovered the high frequency of Internet cables malfunctions.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
They're just a developing country. (http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?id_article=8986)
Can someone please hack my power grid and coffee machine and tell it to start making coffee, in one hour, so it's done when i'm home?
Thanks.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
doesn't change the facts one bit. liars & touts & shills oh my! better days ahead? additional patentdead PostBlock censorship suppled by robbIE.
I recommend decaf from now on.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
The proof is in it. Whoever is making claims that Chinese/Russian gov't is involved should show it to us, otherwise this is FUD. They don't have to name names of spies, etc but they need to give us more then "we know it's china/russia".
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Well I happen to work for a government agency, and a very disproportionately large number of the attacks we see on a daily basis are coming from China. Whether or not these are state sponsored, I don't know, but the Chinese government certainly isn't making any real effort to hold these "useful idiots" at bay. You would of course expect more because they are more populous but it really is disproportionate, more like 8x-10x the amount of attacks seen from other wired countries per capita. At what point does a country become responsible for the traffic that leaves its borders? Especially one with border firewalls? I'm on board with the information warfare theory. I see it every day...I'm in favor of holding them responsible.
"Schneier is a computer security expert, not a geo-strategist, and he was wrong about Iran's lost connectivity a few months ago when we all discovered the high frequency of Internet cables malfunctions"
In what way was Schneier wrong about Iran and how does not being a geo-strategist relate to the validity of the claims that China infiltrated the US power grid?
Didn't Jack Bauer take care of this two seasons ago?
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
This is like "duuuuh!", like you know...
It's like I can't see why China would like, you know, PUBLICLY ADMIT LIKE THEY'RE FUCKING WITH THE U.S.
This is not news at all. Thank you.
is worth also the FUD which tells them that their power grid is under Internet attack
being an electrical engineer and having an electrical power engineer as father - he said: BULLSH?T
If it were the UK hacking the US power system, my wall outlets would start leaking oil.
Your joke would have been funnier if you hadn't used the first half of it as the Subject line.
Anonymous has struck again!
Damned terrorists.
I'm pretty sure Joe the Dragon can use english a lot better than you can use his native language.
but
Officials cautioned that the motivation of the cyberspies wasn't well understood
Officials are the ones making the accusations
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Wang Baodong said..
As Bruce Schneier said which one of these power outages is by hackers
I just hope this isn't some cover for the US to do what their accusing others of, why else this line below...
It is worth looking at Bruce Schneier' view of this: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/us_power_grid_h.html The point being that there are no control/SCADA systems on the grid which are also connected to the internet.
Maybe it's mutant commie alien trees that are hacking the US power grid.
Modern day espionage as far as I can see it is bargaining chip, much like nuclear weapons. It's about what leverage you have. It's not so much the use of it, but rather a demonstration of what can be done.
We now are now entering the age of Digital Mutually Assured Destruction and Economic Mutually Assured Destruction. For you wee tikes out there that was what kept the USA and Soviet Union (hell do the kids even know what a soviet is anymore?) from turning the world into the game Fallout 3...
N-MAD and now D-MAD and E-MAD.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
You're absolutely right
I'm skeptical of the whole story. Is our eletrical grid really accessible to spies? If our electric grid is connected at all to the public Internet then we have bigger problems, namely TeH Stupid, and we'll soon defeat ourselves with our own dementia.
Second, When you find software 'payloads', as the story claims the officials have , is your first impulse not to phase out all infected systems and replace them with safe, clean ones? This seems pretty easy to fix.
All this info was based on the fact that some USA power stations have their IP's blacklisted on spam blacklists.
:) A lot more US gov places like DoD and military have got theirs too.
Couldn't it just be that their security isn't exactly in condition and they just got the normal spambots there?
And to add to that, its 50x more logical explanation than the "bad" chinese and russians hacking USA power grids to do bad things.
or does it sound like someone has been watching too much 24. (Sends in Jack Bauer to investigate.)
*OR* nothing really happened, as pointed out multiple time grid control are not on the net, and somebody just overhyped something far more usual like hacker trying to get control on a computer linked to internet for botting.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Can ya feel it?
Something with the grid, web communications coming down the line.
FISA/NSA snoop us, so they know what we (the important among us) talk about, and are able to use timing as a weapon against us.
They release a stories about problems with our infrastructure potentially being cracked on a quarterly basis the stories with no ROOT (identifiable person) spam the web with either overly moderated, closed topic, or non-existant feedback forms from BIG fascist news sources. Always ignoring common sense. e.g. DISCONNECT the infrastructure from the web.
There's a bill to give the president power to "Kill the web"
Common man can't declare bankruptcy. While the biggest piracy the EARTH has ever seen is willingly allowed to happen by our Senate.
every man woman and child now owe's $40,000.
Attacks on journalists, especially blogger journalism.
Never-ending Emergency State, yellow alert currently.
Something's up. And it's coming from these piece of shit death squad, war profiteering players from the 1970's. You can bet your fucking ass.
Not only does the pentagon need a Security Evaluation Check of ever person. They need to get out all them old creepy fuckers from Central America, etc.
Real life hacking attempt to bring a nation to it's knees. It worked for days.
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia?currentPage=all
Had the same people had access to the power grid, the assault would have been more effective.
Pakistan denies role in terrorist attacks in India
This also reflects the skill set of our technicians. Are our IT professionals too incompetent to keep crackers out? "So easy even a caveman can do it" ... ...
FTFA: What about the "additional packages" left behind?
Let me wrap my head around this
Not only can we NOT keep intruders out of our networks
Our IT personnel can't even clean the droppings the intruders left behind???
Maybe we should just hire and pay some Chinese techs to secure our networks then ...
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
In America, you claim your electrical grid was hacked. Because from Soviet China, grid hacks you!
It was employees looking at bad animal porn sites.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
"Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers."
That's pretty damn shortsighted on his part, then. We should be worrying about criminal mischief, but it's simply stupid to ignore national security implications of things like infrastructure. If another major war between peer nations comes, it won't just be ordinance being dropped... attacking each other by non-conventional and "soft" means will be a part of it too.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I won't cum in your mouth, I'll only put the head of it in, and I am not hacking your infrastructure.
Ok, kids, get off my lawn.
The internet is cheaper than a dedicated line, to be sure -- so what? You trade bucks for security willing in a lot of other contexts. Oh, that's right, using M$ hackable-by-design software, you might have trouble with doing anything a bit out of ordinary, like a dialup or dedicated line.
Sure, stuff that controls the grid (which BTW I've not been on for 3 decades now -- solar has been reliable for that long already) has to integrate, which requires connection. Those were a lot of words to explain the obvious, while failing to understand that the gee whiz neato internet isn't the only way there is to push bits. Talk about a failure of assumption checking!
Does this mean we have to let the whole world have access to that connection? No, only if we insist that the Inet is the only way. Duh.
I believe Bruce Schneier had a topic on this one a few years back. On the internet, people can attack from anywhere, with little cost to them. Where I live, to attack me in any other way, you have to get here first, which costs you something.
Crap, the power companies already push data right down the HV lines now at a few hundred kHz -- and prevented a new ham band from being authorized as they were afraid it might interfere with it. It's not like there's no way other than the open internet to exchange data in reasonably real time.
What a boner.
Given that actively infiltrating another country's critical infrastructure and sabotaging it would be considered a provocative act of war by a good number of states, it seems unlikely that China would be eager to do this. Yes, they are communists, but they are not particularly eager to get in a big pissing match with the USA, when they seem to be doing so well selling us anything that isn't nailed down. It is possible that such an act is the action of a independent minded general or politburo functionary, but if it is, I expect that they will get slapped down. China gets no real benefit by provoking a major trade partner and heavily armed world power. They are doing quite well right now, and we aren't even really an enemy. Rivals perhaps, but there is nowhere the level of animosity between the US and China that there was between the US and the USSR in the 60s or 80s.
However, China has a number of slavering nationalistic hacker groups operating inside their borders. This seems like the sort of stunt they might pull. If they are responsible, and they blew the job, China will just round up a bunch of them and ship them off to inner Mongolia work camps as an object lesson to their peers. China might be willing to turn a blind eye to their activities while they are a nuisance, but they cannot allow rogue nationalist groups provoke international incidents. It is possible that they are working with the Chinese military, but that doesn't seem that likely, as any link revealed would be a major embarrassment to China and you are back to the same issue of risk vs. reward. States aren't generally eager to cut loose non-government entities to act on their behalf.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Everyone, this is interesting. And I'm not necessarily targeting any particular nation or pick-your-favorite-blackhat-organization...
We're a business in the US Northeast, and while I received the original alerts when it happened, I only discovered yesterday by closely-examining multiple APC UPS' Event Logs on a remote site's network that the remote site's power was cut precisely at 04:02:09 AM on 4/2/2009 for exactly 1 minute. Was this some bored power employee's idea of an April Fool's joke then or what?
Did anyone else see this in the US Northeast region?