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
How much of this is just loose, uncoordinated hackers, using proxies in china?
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.
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?
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
Wow. I rant quite a bit about the threat that China represents, but you certainly take the paranoid cake.
A few issues with your post:
1. China is not an existential threat. That would indeed be the Muslim extremists. You're simply confusing the intent of terrorists with the capability of China.
2. Nuclear boomers are not the solution, and a volley of missiles from them will not terminate the Chinese leadership. Not to mention that it will also mean the end of the US. Remember MAD? Apparently not.
3. Panama owns the Panama Canal. You're referring to the two ports on the exits/entries of the Canal which have been leased to Hutchinson Whampoa. There's a slight, but significant difference there, especially since the US retains the official right to intervene militarily to protect its access to the channel.
4. The treasuries currently bought by the Chinese are their Achilles hill as much as it is ours. How does it go? If you owe a bank 20k, the bank owns you. If you owe a bank 20 million, you own the bank. The comment by the ministry was the sound of a concerned investor: "Please don't fuck with my money."
I find mostly two types of misconceptions about China: either it's a monolithic group of "Reds", with the best of the Cold War rhetoric attached to it. Or it has a master plan to gain world domination, and is deploying it relentlessly.
Both are wrong. China has as many internal issues as any other country, and is subject to all the economic pressures that affect others. The two things that are true are:
1 China thinks longterm. I'm talking decades, centuries.
2 Land and respect is everything.
China can be an issue, and is aggressively pursuing a strategy that will make it the superpower of the world. But that doesn't mean that the only interaction with them will be through nuclear volleys.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.