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

the idiocies of religions are only matched

[circletimessquare]

by the idiocies of nationalism

if anyone looks to the far east and sees a land blissfully free of the stupidities of monotheism, think again: china does have a religion. that religion is called china. han imperialism is on par with all of the other vicious forces in this world we must contend with and defeat. not that china is alone. russian nationalism and imperialism, american nationalism and imperialism... it's all evil, it all must be defeated

one day we will have a world if not free of organized religon and ethnocentrism, at least outside the all-controlling clutches of such

until then, we must all contend with blind pride: the source of so much evil in this world

nationalism and organized religion are forces in this world which must be defeated if we are all to live in peace

And here is what I propose for an answer ...

[golodh]

We have an extensive and poorly secured (as no un-passworded systems, vulnerable dictionary-based passwords, no system auditing, almost no network auditing) IT infrastructure, we have loads of national and international computer burglars banging away at it, we have a lot of people who know something about IT looking for a job, and we have a government looking for sensible ways to spend money so as to alleviate the recession.

Am I alone in thinking that it would be money well spent to set up 3 or so military schools in the US specifically to train network administrators? Students to enlist for the duration of their training (basic raining plus 2 years specialist training), subsequently 5 years of operational service as a sergeant. Graduates of this course to be unconditionally qualified for all basic network security and operation anywhere in the government (from local to federal).

It helps protect both our civillian and our military IT infrastructure, it builds a reservoir of people who know how to secure and operate a computer network for any government agency to draw from, and it provides jobs.

So ... how about it?