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Does China's Cyber Offense Obscure Woeful Defense?
Gunkerty Jeb writes "The official line in Washington D.C. is that there's a new Cold War brewing, with an ascendant China in the place of the old Soviet Union, and cyberspace as the new theater of war. But work done by an independent security researcher suggests that the Chinese government is woefully unprepared to fend off cyber attacks on its own infrastructure."
What the 6% of our debt they own?
About the same amount the Japanese own.
Where does this "The Chinese own the US" myth come from?
TFA answers your question:
A lot of what is running in China is developed in-house by Chinese firms. They're not using Western products or open source platforms, because they don't trust them or they're worried that someone might put a back door into them.
So they are rebuilding from the ground up without taking advice from other people who have tried it. Eliminates back doors (unless your own coders are putting them in) but it seems the front door is wide open...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
From the interpretation that sensationalist news services give to the words of scaremonger politicians.
I hope you're joking. The Cold War sucked ass. I direct your attention to the history of the Cuban missile crisis. For all intents and purposes, nuclear war should have happened, but (thankfully) didn't happen. I'm still gobsmacked that it didn't!
Life is not for the lazy.
Everyone copied it illegally to save a buck.
It might be the rate at which they're acquiring our debts.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I wonder why China never thought of securing their systems more tightly. Surely they must have realized that retaliation would come their way at some point, no? I mean, aside from the fact secure systems are usually preferably to ones that are not...
Quite so. It is also worth noting that we have never actually seen anything that looks like evidence for the Chinese state organising "cyberattacks" on the US - all we have to go on is allegations spread on places like /. in the form of rumours.
Can it really have escaped anybody's attention that it is extremely easy to spread false rumours, especially on the internet, and it is extremely easy to spoof the origins of any attack?
And how can anybody credit a tall tale about some anonymous source "knowing" that some "Chinese secret service" is orchestrating hacker attacks? It that really all that likely - a guy sits in his parents' garage and just knows this? What happened to simple, common sense and critical thinking? I mean, with Wikileaks you have documents - mr Assange doesn't go around saying "somebody told me ...", does he?
Until this kind of accusations are accompanied by sound references, I can't regard it as more than an attempt to poison the well.
I wonder why China never thought of securing their systems more tightly. Surely they must have realized that retaliation would come their way at some point, no? I mean, aside from the fact secure systems are usually preferably to ones that are not...
That might be related to their lack of confidence in their enemies' ability to attack. Alternatively, they might be considering it like nuclear warfare, in that there's no way to do a perfect job, so the threat of retaliation is more potent. Therefore, they're focusing all resources on aggression.
Additionally, everything is built in-house (for a very large "house"), so they have some security-through-obscurity for the items that aren't just forked F/OSS projects. If I were them, I'd lull other nations into a false sense of my security systems; utilizing the Great Firewall, I'd make all border systems look only marginally secured but then add a second level behind that which features the full spectrum of security.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
The official line in Washington D.C. is that there's a new Cold War brewing
The official line from Fox News is that there's a new Cold War brewing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Foreign_ownership
Is a good starting point. Basically 25% of our debt is in foreign hands, 23% of that the Chinese own. This means they own about 6% of the total US federal debt.
They have no terrorist groups wanting to level Shanghai, there is no such thing as an Al-Qaeda like threat to the PRC in any shape or form.
The Uyghurs are trying. They aren't half the threat that the PRC makes them out to be (the same could be said for Al-Qaeda), but they are still a threat and they still do blow stuff up and kill people.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
And price Chinese manufactured goods out of reach? Yeah, that would fsck the US economy. It would fsck the Chinese economy a whole lot more.
#1 is a precondition to this.
Been there and done that, during the Cold War. That wouldn't royally fsck the US economy by any means.
More tightly than what? The article says the US is as bad or worse. There are no large, well-secured networks. It has never been demonstrated that it is even remotely feasible to do such a thing. Day after day we see these articles about security issues, and eveybody saying, "how could this happen?" as if vulnerabilities were avoidable and abnormal, in the absence of any evidence that this is the case.
There are no large, well-secured networks.
Actually we have multiple large VERY well secured networks. The drawback is that they're only used by government agencies for transmission of classified data and not by our general infrastructure/industry. To my knowledge those have never been victim to attack except by insiders. It would be nice if we had kind of a "yellow" network in between the "green wild west level and "red" classified networks for use on power grids and the like.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
And if people stopped being scared for a moment and thought (which they won't), they'd realize exactly who has whom by the proverbial short hairs on the debt issue. China doesn't want to undermine our ability to pay, say by totally cutting off cash to fund our *deficit* (a different but obviously related issue). They can turn down the cash spigot and make us hurt, but not *too* much, and it'd probably be for our own long term good.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt
I'd say the amount china owns is substantial. I'm against sensationalism as much as the next guy but a trillion dollars held by a foreign country is a shitload no matter how you slice it. Sure Japan has over 75% as much as china but there is a HUGE drop off after that. If we're going to say Japan owns almost as much as China to downplay foreign debt, we should also say Japan and China hold almost as much US debt as the rest of the world combined. You can't totally brush that off to a fox news ratings grab.
Well, they own all your factories.
May the Maths Be with you!