Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The chinese are just as nationalistic as any other group. Do they like how their gov operates? I doubt it. BUT, do they love their country? Sure. Of course, telling the crackers that if they crack local systems, they will get the death penality, but if they crack Foreign systems (namely the west) and share with the gov, they will get money, has a LOT to do with this. Basically, we are still in a cold war with one side KNOWING that it is, while the other side hopes that it is not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To date, we've had hacks that are serious enough to alert us to the real threat, but rarely or never serious enough to cause us real harm.
It's a gentle warning to our vulnerabilities, with plenty of lead time to do something about it. At this point, if we keep on producing vulnerable and exposed important computer systems, we share the blame for the consequences of a serious hack.
I read that article in my latest Pop Sci issue. It was very interesting that many of the Chinese hackers were not explicitly sponsored by the government, but do it for the fame and nationalistic pride. The hacker that the article zeroed in on seemed to disappear after college, but it was fairly obvious he was hired by some level of the government. It's like the Chinese government lets these young hackers learn on their own (so long as they aren't hacking their sites), then offers them jobs once they get skilled enough. The more direct damage from Chinese hackers is more likely from these uncontrollable hobby hackers than from the government sponsored and controlled ones.
What's up with all these "chinese menace" news? There are two in the front page right now, and more or less a dozen this year. Stirring up the herd with this "us vs. them" mentality is something that I'm not be surprised to see on the mainstream media, but here on Slashdot?
When it is not about the Chinese it is about Venezuela. Or Cuba. Brazil and Iran. Good old (ex)Soviet Russia. The french and the european in general.
Echoing Homeland Security FUD the way Slashdot is doing is only to generate buzz, flamebaiting the pro- and the anti-american, creating nothing but more endless threads of mutual accusations and jingoistic regurgitation, overgeneralizing statements and outright racist/xenophobic ones.
Fuck that, if there is nothing better to fill the main index, please, post less, not worse.
We only take action when our bean counters say we've sustained enough damage to cover the cost of change. Just look at flight safety regulations, or car safety regulations, or food safety regulations, or environmental regulations...
mmmm...forbidden donut
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The solution is obvious, get a 'computer' that can't be hijacked to be used as part of a botnet, to launch DDOS attacks, to me co-opted in a spam farm, to be used to steal online identity and steal all your money from your bank account.
I think I've got a calculator watch somewhere that might meet your qualifications.
Seriously, if you think there is anything capable of being connected to the Internet that "cannot" be used for any of this nefarious crap, you're either seriously delusional, or woefully uneducated in security.
Everything can be hacked somehow. If it's got a network port with a cable plugged into it, and that cable allows physical (logical connection not necessary - only physical) connection with the Internet somewhere along the line, then it can be hacked and abused.
Sure, there are systems that are more resistant than others, but everything is vulnerable to some degree.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I'm not real worried about insurgents altering the geopolitical balance of power. I am worried about China doing the same.
Simple test. Get two oil tankers. Put a Chinese flag on one, put a US flag on the other. Sail them along the Somali coast. See which one gets fired upon and which one does not.
How much of this is just loose, uncoordinated hackers, using proxies in china?
Congressional whitepapers on China have been warning for 15-20 years that they are actively working to develop non-traditional means to pursue asymmetrical warfare against the United States. That is, China has been gearing up to go to war with the U.S. that whole time, and we foolishly allowed ourselves to be distracted by the ridiculous Chicken-Little "Terrorists! Terrorists!" meme. It is China, not a bedraggled pack of guys hiding in caves in Pakistan, who poses the existential threat to us.
Everyone acknowledges that Taiwan will be the flash point, meaning that the mainland will forcibly repatriate them if the Taiwanese don't surrender peacefully. Beijing took a run at it about 15 years ago when they started shooting missiles across shipping lanes in the Strait of Taiwan. The U.S. sent a carrier battlegroup to sail up and down between the two parties and that put a hasty end to that, because the Chinese realized that one tiny part of our navy packed enough firepower to sink the entire Chinese navy in 15 minutes.
Since then they've been going at it much more systematically. They've been working hard on the diplomatic front in Africa and South America to develop relationships with resource-rich countries there who are tired of the West lecturing them about morality and corruption. On the business front, they've been moving their corporations closer and closer to strategic locations and critical technology; a shell company for the People's Liberation Army, for example, now administers the Panama Canal, which the U.S. navy uses to redeploy ships between Atlantic and Pacific. Economically, they have built up enormous reserves of U.S. dollars and have now got the entire U.S. economy by the throat--all they'd have to do to throw us into a tailspin is to STOP buying our debt. On the cyberfront they're infiltrating our systems and trying to crack our power grid and military satellites and gain access to classified information. And even their military is catching up. They're actively acquiring Russian Alpha submarines and aircraft carriers, shore-to-ship missiles, amphibious landing craft, and anti-satellite weapons (which they tested last year, you may recall).
The CCP has been very crafty in doing all this, quietly building up their capabilities and pinging us from time to time to test the viability of their strategy, which is to attack first economically and with crackers, and then while we're running around screaming at the chaos, they'll move to seize Taiwan. One of those pings was a couple weeks ago when the Chinese minister expressed doubt about the utility of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. The shockwaves from that one are still reverberating. Another ping was a couple weeks before that when their ships were harassing our boat in the South China Sea. They may believe the time is almost ripe to make their move, because this stuff is coming more frequently now, and because there are signs that the Obama administration, unlike the Bush administration, is choosing to employ intelligent, capable people who keep careful watch on things that matter and are winding down the terrorist! terrorist! crap so they can focus on China.
But that's why the decentralized nature of the Chinese crackers is so dangerous, because it may make the cascade of events to open hostilities inevitable--they can't be controlled by the Chinese government and may start things in motion on their own.
Fortunately, for now, the United States still has the ace up its sleeve that instantly puts an end to all the CCP's plans, as well as the crackers. That ace is called nuclear submarines. China's numerical troop advantage matters naught there, and American submariners have been past masters for decades at outclassing Alphas run by Russians who know how to drive them. And 15 minutes after the U.S. president gives the greenlight, the brutal reign of the Chinese leadership would come to an abrupt end.
I hope the guys in Beijing bear that thought in mind, and reel in the yahoos like the crackers before they start real trouble. I'd really like to avoid us having to draft every single male with two legs and a pulse to fight a war with them, and for my baby daughter to have a chance to grow up.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Ok, over the last couple weeks, several stories have made their way into the news about cybersecurity.
These stories overstate the threat, and, in particular, only serve to loudly announce things which are already well known. For example, the fact that DoD systems are probed continuously by the Chinese. But! That's always been true. Where were all the alarming sounding news reports last year? Two years ago? Ten years ago? Where was Jay Rockefeller's Senate bill, S. 773, which aims to restrict Internet freedom in the United States in previous years? We can all expect the media heat to increase even more as the public is whipped into a frenzy of fear, and then comes to accept that we need the Federal Government to restrict our Internet freedom--for our own safety, of course!
As these stories come through Slashdot, we all bicker amongst ourselves as to how grave the threat is. Or where it's coming from. Or how we might combat it. It's so predictable. And while we're distracted with these irrelevant (although admittedly interesting in some cases) discussions, Senate and House bills are moving through our Congress right now which I consider to be "Patriot Acts" for the Internet. Nobody is talking about those, though.
We get what we deserve when we demand nothing at all.
I Want To Believe
The question remains, if this just (a very large) bunch of isolated individualists on the hunt for fame and fortune, or if they could be united under a common belief and turned into a nationalistic, anti-foreign mass movement like the "Boxers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion, lashing out violently against anything or anyone that critizises or threatens mother China. A lot has been writtten about the downtrodden rural masses that could destroy the chinese "Wirtschaftswunder" in a bloody uprising with unforseeable consequencesfor the world, but I wonder if we also have to be wary about something like a boxer movement in cyberspace.
Following the tradition, I did not RTFA, but I did read the ad on this article. Cisco is advertising something called "The Realm" and illustrating it with some superhero types. Can't those guys take care of China for us? Cisco, save us! And make a reality show of it for our enjoyment.
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?
Why do people not just drop the traffic from these harbors of hostile activity? Even if a cracker was located outside of China and using TOR or something similar to route through China, drop them at the last mile. This will provide at least a small amount of relief. I am sure somebody will respond to that idea with "well they would just use local zombies then". Yes, but dealing with hostile intent on your own soil is much easier to deal with than trying to shut down a connection on foreign soil. Can anyone come up with a reason that doing this on and government network/resource shouldn't be a standard practice? Does anyone in China have a legitimate reason for going to a DoD/FBI/NSA/Military network presence? Nope, not really. Should anyone care if somebody in Hong Kong cannot get to the NYPD website? Nope, not really. Sorry if this sounds a bit extreme but come on, when somebody is able to siphon off terabytes of stolen data on one of the most expensive military projects ever, measures need to be taken.
Maybe our government should start sponsoring patriotic groups of our own in the same way that China does. Instead of treating misguided young hackers as hardened criminals, give them a free pass to operate outside of our borders. Send them a case of Red Bull and a job offer in a few years. Sounds fair to me.
that what is motivating some people in china is exactly the kind of "us vs them" mentality you denounce in the west?
yes, such blind nationalist rabble rousing exists in the west
but what good does it do to pretend it doesn't exist in china?
at best, you are intellectually dishonest, at worst, you are exactly like those who are blindly nationalistic: criticism is something that you can only point at yourself. you are exactly like a blind nationalist because you think only in terms of western actions, as if there are no other actors in the world. in your world view, all we can do is criticize the west, that, for example, if china does some horrible crime, who are we to judge?
well, yes, we CAN judge. as a nonchinese, i am 100% free to criticize china. as long as i do it with intellectual honesty, that openly admits western crimes as well
in fact, to NOT criticize china at all, and only the west, is to serve only some sort of defeatist attitude. not nationally defeatist, but defeatist in terms of the idea that we need to move beyond nationalism, and think critically in terms of world problems free of nationalistic prejudice. you still have a nationalistic prejudice, you just apply it backwards than most. this is an intellectually inferior approach than the idea that you freely criticizing all parties in the world, free of nationalistic prejudice, basing your observations on principles, and principles alone
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Somebody cut the fiber optic lines leaving China.
of course violence will never end for bullshit reasons
do you believe we can minimize it, or not?
or are we doomed to hellish deaths by the millions for stupid reason forever?
if you don't believe in progress, you are part of the problem. you have complicitly accepted the evil that will happen in this world. this is not intelligence, this is mindless cynicism
i believe we can do better. do you believe that or not?
are you intellgient? or are you an empty pointless negative cynic?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was in China 2001, and I can promise you that the DDoS is not generated by some advanced tools or scripts, it just because there were too many people connecting. People sent each emails and agreed on visiting the White House website several days before the "attack". Among those who visited the website, 95% were just normal internet users using Internet Explorer 5.
It is a little disappointing to see /. add to the Chinaphobia media feeding frenzy.
I mean, there are many internal problems with China, and this hacking issue is clearly a potential cause for concern but is there and evidence that there are more hacks coming from China per capita than anywhere else in the world? I would like to see that sort of evidence first before pointing fingers.
Shen jing bing!
the cake is a lie
i describe an intellectually dishonest point of view, and you come in with a comment which is exactly that point of view i am trying to describe
if you are trying to be slyly humorous: haha
if you are actually so dense as to miss the irony: it is perfectly appropriate to criticize china from a point of view of principles, having nothing whatsoever to do with western nationalistic agendas
lookie here:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/controlling-the-chinese-people/
so when taiwan and hong kong go apeshit over jackie chan's remarks, which are clearly pandering to the regime in beijing, are the hong kong and the taiwanese merely puppets of western nationalism in your point of view? or are they angry at jackie chan out of their own independent principles?
actually, its funny, because your words are exactly what the propaganda mouthpieces in beijing say all the time when someone tries to criticize beijing from inside china: they are stool pigeons of the west and they are serving china's enemies. as if you can't criticize china, even if you are fucking chinese, without being some sort of secret agent. that any criticism of beijing only weakens china: as if internal debate within china can't actually STRENGTHEN china. no, there's only one point of view from beijing, and it can never be wrong and it can never be questioned. pfffffft
why is it impossible for you to perceive that you can criticize china on the grounds of purely principles, having nothing whatsoever to do with western nationalism? maybe even what motivates you is love of china when you criticize beijing? imagine fucking that!
do you believe the slashdot editors are serving secret masters at the cia? or perhaps the slashdot editors are neocon dick cheney sympathisers? gee, maybe the editors see a genuine issue, and report it, out of purely principled reasons? naah.. impossible! secret nationalist agendas EVERYWHERE!!! ;-P
in your worldview, everyone is just acting on a nationalistic agenda. no one can be motivated on principles. you're fucking retarded
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And in the context of my post, "Everything" means:
a network port with a cable plugged into it, and that cable allows physical (logical connection not necessary - only physical) connection with the Internet somewhere along the line.
No, you can't hack the small ball of lint in my back pocket. But that wasn't the context of my post, and you know it.
Stop being disingenuous.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......