Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats

An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that seem to be responsible for much of the cyber-trouble emerging from that nation. Quoting: "For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China's government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it's more than that: it's hundreds of thousands of everyday Chinese civilians. ... Jack Linchuan Qiu, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [says:] 'Chinese hackerism is not the American "hacktivism" that wants social change. It's actually very close to the state. The Chinese distinction between the private and public domains is very small.' ... According to [James Andrew Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies], 'The government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And sometimes it tasks them and controls them.' In the end, he says, 'it's easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.'"

Comments

Re:This is America

[maxume]

Are you kidding?

Many European cars fail American crash safety standards. U.S. flights are equally or more safe than the global average. The food supply is quite safe (waiter snot is probably the biggest thing to worry about, not shit in your cabbage).

As far as the environment, you go swim in a river in China and I will swim in 20 rivers in the U.S.