Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Hack New York Times
Rick Zeman writes "According to a headline article in the New York Times, they admit to being hacked by the Chinese, and covers the efforts of Mandiant to investigate, and then to eradicate their custom Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). This was alleged to be in reaction to an article which details the sleazy business dealings of the family of Wen Jiabao, China's newest Prime Minister. China's Ministry of National Defense said in denial, 'Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.'" Update: 01/31 15:00 GMT by T : The Times used Symanetic's suite of malware protection software; Symantec has issued a statement that could be taken as slightly snippy about its role in (not) preventing the spyware from taking hold.
Since they already have access, the NYTimes can just outsource the writing to China. This will reduce labor costs and save China the trouble of filtering articles they do not like. Think of all the new potential readers....
Was the spokesman related to Baghdad Bob?
Maybe they were just trying to read the many witticisms of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd?
Maybe the Chinese hacked Slashdot, that would explain why this story appears here 12 hours after everywhere else?
Okay, shooting people is illegal, but shooting people to protect others from getting shot is not. Compromising internet security is illegal in China, but hacking to "protect" the Chinese people from having their leader's security compromised must be okay, right?
Lethal force is only okay in very specific scenarios -- usually when lethal force is first presented by the attacker. Could you explain what the New York Times did that warranted the use of hacking? Did the New York Times hack the Chinese government? Did the New York Times even threaten to hack the Chinese government?
Obviously, there is nothing worse than having your leader's integrity challenged, so they are doing everybody a favor by hacking the Times.
Actually, I can think of a good deal many things that are worse than having my leader's integrity challenged. Truth be told, I quite enjoy my leader's integrity being challenged -- especially if there is fact behind it. The Western world enjoys this over-scrutiny of our leaders. Here's a worse scenario than your leader's integrity being challenged: your leader actually is corrupt and nobody's able to investigate it!
The only favor they're doing us by hacking the New York Times is showing the world that they believe their control of the media transcends their national borders. By paying petty lip service to their own laws (which are often subjective and which they feel they are above), the Chinese government is telling the foreign presses that they better fall in step with their mouthpieces or they will be hacked.
It's quite sickening and I find no way at all to view this as acceptable. This is an international attack on our constitutional values -- most notably freedom of speech.
My work here is dung.
I think you're missing his sarcasm with the word "obviously."
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BMO
They most certainly do have laws.
They protect the parties members, the corrupt elite and those Chinese who want to confiscate a foreigners businesses.
But, you will find them and the process opaque, haphazard, arbitrary and shockingly harsh... unless of course you are a senior party member, in which case none of this applies to you.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
Everyone knows the hacking threat is made up by the US government, as I am continually reminded every time I try to talk about it.
No, it's not bullshit. I don't know how you draw that conclusion. I look at my family business' firewall logs and see lots of intrusion attempts coming from Chinese IP addresses. It got so bad that I moved the company's website to a VPS and moved our mail server to a cloud-based solution. Now, we just block all foreign IP addresses at the firewall by default.
This sounds a lot like US laws.
It's been the Commie Times for a while now...
'Governor Jiabao. I should have expected to find you holding General Mingfu's leash. Do you realize the more your hackers attack our free (well mostly free) press, the more we will think you're are carrying on like a pack of spoiled brats unfit to replace America as the world's superpower?' http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-general-ominously-warns-australia-not-to-side-with-the-us-tiger-2013-1
He's obviously serious. Obviously.
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BMO
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only person to do this. I block the entire country of China. Their hacking attempts outnumbered legit requests by a factor of 50 to 1.
Why doesn't the great firewall of China work the other way around?
We don't live in Shouldland.
It's quite sickening and I find no way at all to view this as acceptable. This is an international attack on our constitutional values -- most notably freedom of speech.
The capitalist dogs' attack on our noble way of life is what is unacceptable. Their slanderous lies constitute an international attack on our cultural values — and they must not be tolerated! Signed, the Chinese government.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The article makes no mention of the operating system of the compromised computers. This would be like an article on safety faults in automobiles that did not mention the make and model. Can't we have better security reporting from the grey lady? There is mention of a "domain controller" that was compromised to obtain password hashes and that a rainbow table must have been used to crack passwords. Is there anyone who does not think that it was windows computers that were compromised? I can't help wondering if M$ and the NYT have some sort of agreement about how they report on computer security.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Could you explain what the New York Times did that warranted the use of hacking?
Hired hack writers?
Blank until
I cannot imagine how you drew the conclusion that he drew that conclusion.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Why do we keep putting up with this crap and not fighting back? Let's add a stiff import tariff on Chinese junk which would increase revenues and add jobs to this country.
After all, removing information damaging to the prime minister improves "internet security", not damages it ;-)
So that's why all the NY Times Editorials read like commie propaganda!
The BBC is reporting that it was windows computers that were compromised. They quote Graham Cluley, a tech consultant at Sophos. All compromised computers were "thrown out and replaced." All passwords were changed. Another article reports that the hackers would begin working at 0800 Beijing time..
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Aren't these Communists delicate little flowers? Amazingly thin skinned, even though they block anything even vaguely political from mainland China.
I think they are a bunch of stupid Third World pussies, with stupid Third World attitudes. No wonder they're Pakistan's only friend in the world. It takes a dirty, illiterate loser to know one.
Can't say as I blame them. A friend at Symantec who's been involved in the NYT relationship was saying that they've spent over a year trying to get NYT's IT dept to update to SEP v12 to no avail, despite repeated warnings that v12 would catch malware exactly like this. Given that they turned the intrusion into a big story for their employer instead of getting fired, I'd say NYT's IT department spun it pretty well. Given that it's coming at the expense of Symantec, I'd say they're being quite polite.
I block the entire country of China.
If you read the article, you'll notice that they used hacked machines at US universities as a jumping off point.
Given some of the history of the New York Times (the Pentagon Papers, Wikileaks), I have this funny feeling that they aren't just dealing with foreign governments hacking their systems.
Log in or piss off.
Symentec, who's software didn't identify but one of the 45 pieces of malware installed, tried to imply it was the NY Times fault, saying the anti-virus isn't enough (although once such stuff is installed the antivirus should be able to find and eliminate it...that's what they sell it for, right?) - I wonder if Symentec's software can identify all or even most of the malware now, yet? The average user is just so far out in the woods, its obvious most of the anti-malware software (even the biggies like Symentec) are not remotely successful at catching or preventing such attacks (since they obviously won't just be used by the Chinese govt hackers forever).
Steve Bennett - is that you? Don't spread rumours anonymously.
An incompetent or negligent food inspector should be executed, though. He/she might have the lives of tens of thousands of people in his hands, but because he's bored, or hung over, or whatever, he doesn't see the slime growing under the conveyor belt, on which lies tons of raw meat. Slowly, ever so slowly, the slime advances, reaching out for that succulent chicken . . .
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
AC troll vs. Mod Two go in, Only one comes out.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Of course he does, what are all those drones for?
The Chinese aren't communists...
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
They are officially communist, but unlike the USSR they were able to acknowledge that communism isn't always the best solution to every problem and turn to market solutions when appropriate.
Dang, Symantec has really been improving their products lately. That's much better than I've gotten out of them.
so did they try sending themselves some PDF documents about the chinese leaders business dealings, under the email alias of some of the chinese prime ministers friends..? loaded with a few customized malware of their own, or not. after all you just sent it to yourself, right?
It's painfully, obviously obvious.
The Times detailed its assertions in a long article posted to the front of its Website Jan. 30. The attacks apparently began in early September, as the probe into Wen’s family approached its conclusion. While the hackers could have “wrecked havoc on our systems,” according to Times CIO Marc Frons, they focused on infiltrating dozens of employee computers.
Unfortunately, they wreaked havoc on their grammar and spelling.
The New York Times wrote a GREAT article disclosing in full, with technical detail, how they were compromised.
Kudos to them for this in-depth transparency.
The article described in detail how targeted malware attacks were brought against NYT employees. Those were launched from compromised university computers within the US. From there, the custom malware allowed them to hack a Windows AD Domain Controller, and obtain the NTLM hashes. They ran the NTLM hashes against a rainbow table and got 56 user passwords that they used for VPN access.
From there, they were tracked by a security consulting company using an intrusion detection system. They employed a great strategy of not knee-jerk kicking the hackers out, but of watching their moves and determining the scope of compromise. They used forensics hard drive analysis to recover logs and figure out exactly what data was being accessed.
Sounds like what I would do if I was called in for incident response. Except, NONE of my clients would ever allow a story of this detail to be published!!!
Hats off to the NYT for this level of transparency.
This sounds a lot like US laws.
“The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.”
- Frank Zappa
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
No kidding.. I took down the firewall on my router (comcast connection) to test some VPN stuff.. instead of doing a port forward etc.
I was doing this from the in-laws house to my house, and within just a couple minutes I saw attempts from china on the SSH and IPsec/L2TP ports (linux box's firewall was set so you couldn't access the L2TP outside of an IPsec tunnel).
Even after turning the firewall back on, they must have somehow (automated?) realized there was a machine they could access but not log into yet.. and port scanned, because my auth.log was showing SSH attempts on the alternate port my router was forward to SSH... (I disabled password login, just use a 512 bit ECDES key, but the fact they somehow found the alternate port which was in the 16xx range in under an hour was interesting, and so was the fact it wasn't a constant stream of failed log ins.. there'd be 10 to 20 attempts over the course of a couple minutes, then a 30 minute or so gap.. rinse and repeat)
If USU is any indication, China constantly attacks universities. China accounts for at least 1/2 of all attack that arrives at the USU border. See: https://it.wiki.usu.edu/20120301_ScanSummary
Many of these attack appear to require favorable quality of service packet delivery. We frequently see flawless packet delivery in high speed Chinese scans and Chinese vulnerability assessments. Currently, we are receiving a comprehensive Chinese vulnerability assessment every 5 days. It would be a great service if we had paid for it. And if they would share the results with us :) See: https://it.wiki.usu.edu/20120101_China_Test
Miles
They could launch their attacks from China, through Europe / Japan / Korea / South America / Africa / etc... and then to the US. Would blocking China IP addresses be useful?
w00t
First thing I thought of as I read TFA was: The Cuckoo's Egg