Slashdot Mirror
A Look Into the Chinese Hacker Underworld
beachels416 writes "The NY Times gained access to a Chinese hacker-for-profit, referred to as 'Majia,' and observed him during one of his nightly 'sessions.' From the article: 'Oddly, Majia said his parents did not know that he was hacking at night [hacking is illegal in China]. But at one point, he explained the intricacies of computer hacking and stealing data while his mother stood nearby, listening silently, while offering a guest oranges and candy.' At another point Majia spoke about the recent Google attacks, and claimed to have particular knowledge of the exact vector used. Nothing too new, but an interesting read nevertheless."
That article certainly puts a new slant on things.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
...newer brags ...you'll never know - ever.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
To sum up the article for those too lazy to read it
A chinese guy works a day job, works as a hacker at night. Likes to stay anonymous and take money from people's bank accounts.
I guess the fact that this is a chinese guy is shocking to some new york times readers?
Look, its a simple process of elimination. First we coordinate the offender using black-ops satellites circling above the Himalaya. Once the hacker is pin-pointed in his bunker we upload a 'spike' directly to his IP address, which is gained by triangulating his cell phone signature via wi-fi antennas of surrounding Starbucks coffee shops. The 'spike' will immediately disrupt use of his cerebral cortex, thus rendering said malicious and poorly misguided comrade into a defenseless and innocuous teddy bear.
The article highlights two important facts
1. Fun
2. Profitable
It's been a long time since I broke into my grade school's soda/chips/candy closet from a skylight on the roof. Sitting there drinking soda and enjoying chips, I can clearly remember how exciting (breaking in) and rewarding (chips/soda) it was. Later, I learned to respect other people's property.
So what now? ... expect the back doors to be open and the cargo gone. It's very exciting - it's very rewarding. Is it wrong - sure. Are the thieves the ones to blame - no. Not exactly. The thieves are not the ones to blame - the thieves are to be expected. It's an ongoing game where we square off with human nature - make it furn for the security side - keep building better mouse traps. Don't like this perspective? Ok - change human nature then. Good luck.
If you park a trailer in an accessible area
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
cracking is illegal in any civilized country. I am pretty sure that if he spends nights hacking, Chinese authorities won't put him in jail unless he tries to hack something in order to circumvent their controls.
I guess the NYT needs to attach a disclaimer to the story, because whenever a journalist tries to interview a "hacker" I can't decide to laugh or cry. Something like this would do nicely:
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Sure, please enter your Credit or Debit card info along with Name, Address ... Allow six weeks for delivery.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Or is China obsessed with kdawson? We can never know.
His C# book on his desk that is.
I didn't see anything in the article about hacking. It all looked like cracking to me.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
MIT hackers don't tend to do things that are destructive of property, and in fact tend to spend a good bit of money for temporary appendages to various campus buildings for their hacks. I don't actually know a single cracker here at MIT.
I guess plenty of Slashdotters learned a bit about computing from minor cracks - almost everyone has changed a save game file with a text or hex editor. Insecure network shares at your school network. Getting your neighbors' insecure Wifi passwords, someone probably thinks MAC filtering alone is safe. Modifying Flash games to give yourself 2^31 - 1 points on the high score board. Getting root on random poorly secured UNIX terminals in tech expos. Getting into someone else's IIS and read his local files via the canonical path bug many years ago. etc.
Sure it's not healthy if all you do are these minor thing and you keep doing these stuff for years. But it's a good inlet for kids to learn computing nevertheless.
Why is this guy living with his mom if he's such a great and skilled hacker? Where's his money? Where's his grandiose lifestyle? What is he doing with all those computers he's woven into a bot-net? If he's making all that money, why isn't he spending it?
I wonder if we're making the Chinese Dragon out to be far more fearsome than it actually is. Why exactly should I be afraid of him, and all his Chinese brethren? Yes, they can hack, yes they can start and fight a cyber-war. But I am underwhelmed by their power if all they do is sit there day after day, coding, hacking, "making money", and not doing anything with it. And if they do eventually start and fight a cyber war, then they will end up losing the only medium that gives their life meaning. What happens to these guys when we counter-strike (because I refuse to believe that my fellow Western neckbeards would take a cyber-ass-whuppin' from the Chinese lying down)? When their networks go down and their computers are infected or taken out, what then? I can get up and leave my computer. Can they?
I'm a naive bumpkin most likely, I just fail to see how these guys are so formidable. Pathetic is more like it, like a boxer with a glass jaw. Their greatest strength is actually their weakness.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
"Majia" can mean "sockpuppet" in Mandarin.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
Come on, everyone knows the Great Firewall of China is only in place to filter out kdawson posts.
...he showed how he hacked into the Web site of a Chinese company. Once the Web site popped up on his screen, he created additional pages and typed the word “hacked” onto one of them.
Perhaps the journalist had no idea how web browsers work...
Perhaps the "hacker" just pressed Ctrl+T then typed:
javascript:document.write('<h1>HACKED</H1>');
into the address bar...(try it)
Point being: The journalist didn't describe "Majia" doing anything that I would consider cracking... From the description given, Majia could have just been updating his own blog.
You can add the word "Hacked" to the top of almost any web page (incuding this one) by pasting this into your address bar:
javascript:b=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];b.insertBefore(document.createTextNode('Hacked!'),b.firstChild);void(0);
Does that make you a hacker?
To a NYT Journalist, yes.
Oddly, Majia said his parents did not know that he was hacking at night [hacking is illegal in China].
His parents know. If he hacks for money, is up late at night fiddling with computers all the time, and talks about hacking with unusual guests right in front of his mom, she knows what is going on. This is a mother with traditional, conservative beliefs who does not want to be rude and is reluctant to admit that her son is a criminal, so she ignores the entire situation. Not that unusual, and not indicative of some strange counter cultural underworld that is unique to China. Though I'm sure my folks and my friends' parents all thought our blue boxes, black boxes, and mobile (as in, in a car) collections of computers and cordless phones were all for educational purposes back in the day, and the 2600 meetings were just to hang out and drink coffee, since that's what we told them.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
According to the article:
Umm, I attended a major US university and got degrees in computer engineering and computer science. During my senior year, I lived on a dorm floor that was the home of the "computer science learning community", basically where many of the new freshman CS majors elected to live. All of them, every single one, was a gamer, and many were of the stereotypical Dungeons and Dragons, renaissance festival attending, medieval replica weapon carrying, nonbathing comp sci niche. They got into comp sci because they were nerds with very strong interests in gaming, and quickly found out that comp sci was about math and programming, not slacking off playing games. Not one of them it to their sophomore year in computer science (not that no freshman made it, but none of the ones in the learning community did).
I'm sorry NYT, but you are wrong yet again. Having a bunch of gamers does not mean you have a bunch of hackers. In fact, it probably has an inverse correlation, because those who take the time to really master games like WoW, collecting every item and reaching every level, typically don't have the time to become an expert in how computers actually work. No wonder the NYT is going bankrupt... this is about the same level of accuracy we see in their political and economic stories as well.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.