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Chinese Propaganda Accidentally Reveals Cyberwar
An anonymous reader writes "A Chinese military propaganda video aired in mid-July inadvertently showed a Chinese military university launching cyberattacks against U.S. websites. The Epoch Times reports the video shows 'custom-built Chinese software apparently launching a cyber-attack against the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, by using a compromised IP address belonging to a United States university.' A screen in the video also reveals 'the name of the software and the Chinese university that built it, the Electrical Engineering University of China's People's Liberation Army.'"
Apparently China's best and brightest hackers need a GUI with drop-down menus and a big "Attack" button.
The sleeping dragon is strong indeed. I wonder if they have a "Pull trigger to fire" sticker on their rifles too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Speaking of hacking, you posted over an hour before the article release time? How did you do this? I know you have a subscription, but so do I and I've always had to wait to comment until the article publish time. Hacked Slashdot lately?
Its another example of China streamlining a process and using it in their war against the rest of the planet. Like gold farming or melanin tainted baby formula.
I got here through a series of tubes
frist psot?!!
it's the cyber-attack that launches you.
There's one detail to bear in mind when you read the article from The Epoch Times.
From wikipedia: The The Epoch Times was founded in 1999 by supporters of the Falun Gong spiritual discipline. [...] The newspaper is heavily critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and policies of the Chinese government.
I'm wondering who is responsible for the Falun Gong website and where they live?
It'd be pretty hilarious to see a lawsuit in US courts against the Chinese government going after Chinese government property. (US debt)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
So, now the cat is officially out of the bag. So, what? We already knew there was something up. Are we going to sail gunboats up the creek at Guangzhou and shell some forts? Blockade their ports? Embargo their trade? No. Hell, we still gave them control of a root DNS node, even though it's obvious this gives them added offensive capability. Really, all this might do is tweak the language in subsequent news reports when Chinese attacks occur. They'll still deny them, but now that there is an (inadvertently) officially acknowledged offensive capability, the categorical denials won't carry as much weight.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Do we still have to pay them back the money we owe them if they are attacking us? Can we just call it even?
The Chinese government has a weird obsession with Falun Gong, which I don't quite understand. I was in Flushing, Queens the other week and there was actually this whole (unmanned) table with signs, flyers, etc., blasting the Falun Gong as this insanely dangerous cult. I can't imagine who set it up other than the Chinese government.
So.. since the US made such a big deal about cyber attacks being seen as an act of war, can you guys let me know when the nukes start flying?
Oh.. wait.. China? You mean the US's sugardaddy? nvm..
University of Alabama at Birmingham.
ROIC
Allah Gold, is that you?
Remember folks, Epoch Times is a Falun Gong house organ.
A screen in the video also reveals 'the name of the software
Everything China makes is just bad ripoffs of our original work. So... how do you write "Back Orifice 2000" in Chinese, and does that match the video?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
In the video, the user selects from the drop-down first, and then the IP address is automatically filled. It would be useful to get a direct translation of the text.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Some students in some school trying to hack a remote website as a lesson or undertaking a project of cyberwar does not constitute cyberwar. if it is a military school it is even more than normal that they would be given such a project, because - not surprisingly - the military types see something called 'cyberthreat' and are carrying their military mindset to information technology like they get everything involved with warfare.
otherwise defcon et al would be considered the biggest cyberwar perpetrators on earth.
Read radical news here
Does everybody really believe this "release" wasn't an "accident" by China?
I loved the part where a network administrator from UAB claims their network hasn't been compromised. News flash. If you're on a university network--any university network--it's been compromised.
China is NOT our friend.
China spends inordinate amounts of money on espionage to steal government secrets and attempts to steal private intellectual property.
It is time to stop coddling the Chinese leaders.
Of course, that would take strong leadership here. Sheesh.
*squint* ...nah, they've just taken a subtle jab at the decadent capitalist propaganda, the "C.S.I.". This is obviously a GUI made quickly in Visual Basic, to trace IPs.
Seriously, though, just because a some form of an user interface, or mockups of the same, exists, doesn't mean the software does. And the IP address shown doesn't necessarily mean anything - could be just a random number. What it does show is that someone in Chinese government probably considering whacking Falun Gong sites, one way or other - and that would not exactly be news, now would it?
a fair number of those "students" are funded by PRC government; for them, it's just a job. the roof over their head and the food on their table are paid for by PRC. so really, is it a surprise that they're out in force whenever anyone disagree with the current party line?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Attacking the Falung Gong website? Not exactly an act of war.
So now everything you see in propaganda reel is gospel again?
Wasn't there a clip a few months back that got panned roundly because they spliced in a segment from the motion picture '"Top Gun"?
Take your pick which one is more believable.
Perhaps being interviewed regarding their time abroad once they return home encourages them to demonstrate "patriotism" while aboard?
Awww lets start one with china.. They need a population adjustment anyways.
Because it's an anti-government cult set up by the CIA and Taiwanese to destabilize China. Gee, I seem to remember the US government slaughtering the entire "Branch Davidian" cult in the 90s and they are much much smaller than Falun Gong and did not have any backing from foreign intelligence services! Also, Epoch Times is an anti-China propaganda paper. I'd take it about as seriously as a paper from Hitler Youth.
Its hard to take your post seriously either. The Branch Davidians were heavily armed and shot at cops who came onto their property. They also spread flammable liquids all about their bunkered building. Whether they ignited these flammables intentionally or it was accidentally ignited by gov't smoke grenades, gunfire, etc is debatable. The fact remains that the davidians prepped their own building for fire. Get back to us when the Falun Gong go down such a path. AFAICT their crime is believing there is something more authoritative than the Chinese Communist Party.
Asked for a statement, China's People's Liberation Army spokesperson said:
"We do it for the lulz"
I've seen VB mentioned more than once. The window chrome is not standard windows and it's not standard VB.
The "X" button has no title bar border between it and the window border. In all version of windows that have had an "X" close button, there is space between the button and the window border.
The "-" button is reminiscent of windows 3.x and prior. You won't find that in any version of windows where an "x" button appears on the title bar, which is win 95 and later.
This GUI looks to be running on some windows-ish styled flavor of Linux. Most likely the communist parties own flavor.
Or at the minimum, force them to play Duke Nukem Foreva !! which, if you ever "played" it, has this unforgettable line
The only good red is a dead red !!
If you take down our infrastructure, it will be much harder - if not impossible - for us to pay back all of that money we've borrowed.
Just saying, you know. It would be a shame to have to default on those loans. A real shame.
So knock it off. Understand?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The IP address showing in the screenshot accompanying TFA is: 130.26.72.17. That entire 130.26 Class-B network is owned by Hewlett Packard. Falun Gong are a bunch of wackjob lying liars. Seriously. They're like Scientology + The Force + Tai Chi + Jehovah's Witnesses.
A few excerpts from the bible of Falun Gong, Zhuan Falun [falundafa.org]. Such great thoughts are required reading for every American who seriously wants to help the practitioners of this religion.
"Under the effect of a special electromagnetic field qigong masters can have strong luminescence, and it’s really beautiful. The higher a person’s potency, the larger the energy field he projects. Ordinary people have one too, but it’s a really weak kind of luminescence. People who do research in high-energy physics think of energy as being things like neutrons and atoms. A lot of qigong masters have been tested. And all the qigong masters who are pretty well-known have been tested, in fact. I’ve been tested, too, and they found that I emit gamma rays and thermal neutrons 80–170 times greater than the radiation of normal matter. At that point the needle of the testing instrument had hit the limit, and since the needle had hit the maximum point they couldn’t tell exactly how strong it was. "
"When a person gets to an extremely high level, after he’s gone beyond Triple-World-Law cultivation, an eye that’s like a compound eye appears. To be more specific, a large eye develops over the whole top half of his face, and there are countless small eyes in it.
Some Great Enlightened Beings at really high levels have cultivated an incredible number of eyes, and they’re all over their faces. All of their eyes see out of that one large eye, they can see whatever they want to, and when they look they see all levels at once.
Nowadays zoologists and entomologists study flies. They’ve seen that a fly’s eyes are big, and that under a microscope they have countless small eyes in them. They call that a compound eye. When you get to a really high level that cultivation state might appear, but you have to be way higher than a Tathagata to have that happen. An ordinary person won’t be able to see it, though, and somebody who’s at an average level won’t be able to see that it’s there. To them the person looks the same as a normal person since it’s in another dimension. This is about breakthroughs in levels, or to put it another way, it’s about being able to break through different dimensions."
"There was a student in Qingdao City who meditated on a bed during his lunch break when nobody else was in the room. As soon as he started meditating he levitated up, he sprang up forcefully over a yard high, and then he came back down. He kept springing up and down, “Thud! Thud!” and even the bedspread was bounced off onto the floor. He was a bit excited and also a little scared. He kept springing up and down the whole lunch break. Eventually the work bell sounded, and he thought, “I can’t let other people see this. They’ll wonder what’s going on. I’d better stop.” Then it stopped."
Enough said. Obviously an attack on Falun Gong is an attack on America. The two share so many core values.
Re-reading the article, shows the IP as: 138.26.72.17 (stupid eyes).
Nice. Class A:
University of Alabama at Birmingham - University Computer Center UAB (NET-138-26-0-0-1) 138.26.0.0 - 138.26.255.255
NetRange: 138.0.0.0 - 138.255.255.255
CIDR: 138.0.0.0/8
My other position still stands. They're nuts.
It is possible that some nameless faceless bureaucrat who doesn't approve of this government sponsored hacking spliced that clip into the video knowing that his variant of pointy hair managers wouldn't get it.
I'm pretty sure it was the 'US University' that was the issue, not the attacking Falung Gong. If they wanna DDOS someone out of existance from their own sovereign computer systems I'm pretty sure that would be ok (right up until their DDOS started affecting the network pipes in between them and the Falung Gong servers.) *HOWEVER* This would be the equivalent of say Canadians coming onto American soil to lob mortars at Mexico. Mexico would take it as tacit approval by the US of the Canadian attacks on them, and might see fit to retaliate against them instead of Canada (since obv the US would be the low hanging fruit for them, from both a geographical and security point of view.)
Its very simple, I block China. And Russia, most of India and all of the "western bloc" nations. NOTHING good comes, in terms of traffic, from those nations. Bastards make all of our goods and have our jobs and they arent satisfied until they take down our networks? Screw them. ALL of them.
We trust China with our money and lose trade-secrets; we get sabotaged medical products, lead in children's toys; a means of mass pet euthanasia; toxic chemicals in our toothpaste; defective electrical components; metallurgy gone bad in bridge construction material; drywall that will leave your house a corroded and broken mess; and consumer products that last just a day past their low 90 day warranty (and usually not if they can squirm out of it).
Still we blindly hand away ourselves to the ultimate buy out. Hope we'ree all ready to learn a new language, and it is not as easy to parse as C, C++, perl, python, or any of the like. Unicode will have to be extended to a crazy value, while we learn to babble like a fax machine to communicate it. Based on the old Commodore 64 sprite structures: 24 bits east by 21 bits south. That might have enough room for a typical character. That's 504 bits which would be padded into 512 bit "blobs". Good luck running "grep" or doing a reg-ex match on this.
here are some takes on the interesting parts of the original vid (from http://military.cntv.cn/program/jskj/20110717/100139.shtml) Timestamp (TS) 11:08: dropdown menu option for DDoS -> Ctrl+D. The software looks pretty old, definitely the IP address has been inactive for a while, interesting that whatever software they built includes DDoS options. TS 11:09: interesting string across the top reads XX....1.0 the XXs are too blurry, rest reads "XX-type Network Attack System... PLA Electronic Engineering Institute... Version 1.0" Hope someone can get the XX. TS 11:10: one of the dropdown options is for Falun Dafa in the Alabama region. These guys did their homework! And it's interesting that the IP address is for the Alabama site even though the final selection is for Minghui Network (TS 11:13) which is hosted on the West Coast. Problem in the software? TS 11:12: you can see the Alabama IP address site being loaded in a screencap on the left side. Site definitely looks like Falun Gong what with the "Truthfulness" slogan and all. I don't think the site at ABU is running anymore. So that prolly gives some sort of idea of when this software was actually running? Quien sabe.
THEM CHINESE !!! right ? precisely proper after the fashion of china fobia and china blaming that is so hip in usa nowadays ....
Read radical news here
There's a reason why they don't use real IP number in the movies. What's the probability of hitting a real and current IP by chance? Which country has most IP numbers and how are they shared between countries?
There's a reason why they don't use real IP numbers in the movies. What are the chances that you hit some real and current IP by making numbers up? AFAIK IP's are not geographically equally distributed either.
All that means is they still have family within the clutches of the Central Committee. Best to be patriotic in that circumstance and jump when told.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They're not that different from any other religion, like the 7th Day Adventists or Christian Scientists.
Best Slashdot Co
My husband works for a large software developer company. They have gotten countless cyberattacks coming from China for a long time, but they can never prove it's the Chinese govt. Still, you have to wonder who in China is rich enough, powerful enough, and interested enough in taking out US software companies and learning their software weaknesses-- OTHER THAN the Chinese govt. I can't think of any Chinese corporation that fits that specific bill (unless Wal-Mart is going into software programming). I'm sure the video was no mistake, and that the Fallon Gong attack is just the only one they want to own up to.