The Undeclared "Cyber Cold War" With China

First time accepted submitter lacaprup writes "Chinese-based hacking of 760 different corporations reflects a growing, undeclared cyber war. From giants like Intel and Google to unknowns like iBahn, the Chinese hackers are accused of stealing everything isn't nailed down. Simply put, it is easier and cheaper to steal rather than develop the legal way. China has consistently denied it has any responsibility for hacking that originated from servers on its soil, but — based on what is known of attacks from China, Russia and other countries — a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached almost $500 billion"

Comments

The "Chinese Hacker" myth is overblown

[MetricT]

I'm sure the Chinese government has their crack team of hackers, just like we do. Having said that...

I run a honeypot at work. 70% of the attacks do come from Chinese machines, but I suspect that's because the Chinese buy those $2 pre-hacked warez'd Windows CD's at the market and don't install security updates.

Of the actual living, breathing hackers that log into my honeypot, 1/3 of them come from Romanian IP's, and another 1/3 come from other eastern European countries, but the text files/strings in their utilities are Romanian. Wired has a good article which partly corroborates this.

      http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/all/1

I see two modes of attack. 98% are single machines launching 100's of attacks. 70% of those are in China. The other 2% are distributed attacks. These are more likely to be major power intelligence agencies, and don't have anywhere near the geographic concentration as the single-machine attacks (Chinese IP's are 15% of distributed attacks, same as Brazil).

Re:The "Chinese Hacker" myth is overblown

[MetricT]

Here's a little write-up about some of the hacking I've seen.

http://binkley.accre.vanderbilt.edu/documents/hack-stats.txt

True Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon just to make sure i dont get yelled at.

I work for an infrared camera manufactuerer that does government work. We know that the chinese are trying to get into our servers on a daily basis.

Re:$500 billion? Reality check!

[Desler]

You're an order of magnitude off. US GDP is $15 trillion so that's only 3.3%. Learn2maths.

Does this surprise you?

[betterunixthanunix]

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN

TLDR: English-speaking nations around the world have conspired to use their signals intelligence capability (ECHELON) to engage in industrial espionage and pass trade secrets on to their own corporations.