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Wall Street Journal Hit By Chinese Hackers, Too
wiredmikey writes "The Wall Street Journal said Thursday its computers were hit by Chinese hackers, the latest U.S. media organization citing an effort to spy on its journalists covering China. The Journal made the announcement a day after The New York Times said hackers, possibly connected to China's military, had infiltrated its computers in response to its expose of the vast wealth amassed by a top leader's family. The Journal said in a news article that the attacks were 'for the apparent purpose of monitoring the newspaper's China coverage' and suggest that Chinese spying on U.S. media 'has become a widespread phenomenon.'"
...they could have set up the newspaper as a honeypot.
in other news, Pot was reported to have complained about Kettle's excessively dark color.
The news of the earlier hack got me thinking about the unique risk/reward of ubiquitous communication and the challenge of computer security to keep pace. Certainly some say the pace of technological innovation is no longer in step with yesterday's, but that almost begs the question. It's truly ironic that modern computing becomes physically smaller as its footprint on our lives looms ever larger with each new year, yet no one disputes that, lately, electronic progress rests solely within the social stratum these days.
We should ask ourselves, however, the rather basic question of whether this seismic shift in the nature of the changes in technology brings with it an impedimentary effect on our lives, or indeed to wonder to the degree technology has ever been pedimentary when it comes right down to it. Yes, it's certainly got its foot in the door, but as with feet and doors it's not always possible to know at the moment of impact whether said foot represents opportunity, doom, or a casualty of a society overeager to shut the door to change.
Certainly the last thing anyone wants is a race to the bottom. Ah, but that's not entirely accurate when one considers the vested interest shoemakers have in most modern day footraces. It suggests that, moving forward, the most important thing to do when evaluating new technology in 2013 may very well be to first identify the shoemakers for that technology. Ask yourself: if I'm already wearing five pairs of socks, do I even need shoes at this point? Odds are, you don't.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Anyone else surprised that China is run by a corrupt dictatorship? Anyone else surprised that the the ruling members amass vast wealth?
Does it happen here? Sure. But at least we can vote the bush family out every once in a while.
The Chinese people aren't' dumb. They know the ruling party is on the take. They see the special privlage, the fancy cars, the vast fortunes. What sucks is the attitude. They either want to ignore it, pretend it's OK as if it's their lot in life to be shit on, or they lust to be one of the powerful so they can step on everyone else.
The Chinese traditional lust for conformity and saving face is ultimately what enslaves them.
China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”
Couldn't agree more. There's no evidence, just accusations without any basis. Yet another example of the US media making sensationalist claims which deride the leadership of China and rail public opinion against them.
/. might evren pick up the story and start attacking (morally and perhaps directly) the Chinese authorities. Not only would 'Cyber Security' become even more of a well known issue, but controlling the internet (ie. SOPA) could be put back on the cards AND my opponent would be under attack without me having to raise a finger or accept any blame.
Personally, if I were a government looking to contend with another government, my best weapon would be a false flag faceless cyber attack against a large news media organisation which could be widely publicised and blamed on my enemy without any evidence. That would not only rail public opinion against the 'other' government, but justify my expanded spending on 'Cyber Security'.
If I was really lucky, the unemployed US computer geeks on
'Cyber Security' is the new 'Terrorism'. Take the red pill.
Not to mention that the quote is from Yoda, and not Mr. Spock...but I guess that's picking nits when the entire sig has to be a joke :p
Because that would also inhibit all the internet spying that everyone else is doing to the Chinese.
And the worms ate into his brain.
HUZZAH! Trolling sig wins again!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
They rant and rave and get all butthurt about the embassy bombing in Belgrade.
But somehow, criminal hacking on Western media is somehow nowhere near as bad.
They are the worst hypocrites.
So if I understand correctly, headlines of the NY Times and the WSJ
tomorrow will read "US does not spy on China"?
... that if WSJ was really hacked, it was hacked from the inside --- after all, routing the hack to some servers in Ukraine or China doesn't take much effort at all.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
China has more people of above-average intelligence than America has people. How much of an army of moderately-clever hackers could they put together if they wanted?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/pentagon-cyber-security-expansion-stuxnet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/obama-guantanamo-pentagon-cyber-yemen
Liberty.
Oh my stars, another corrupt police state caught doing unsavory things. The government of a rising world power is profiteering! The shock, the horror of it all!
Come on people, governments and corporations do bad things to each other all the time as a matter of course. The only limit is capability. Shame and ethics mean nothing in the world of global capital and paid-for governments.
As long as there is no serious interruption of the money flow, it is all just business as usual. Nuclear deterrence doesn't prevent big conflicts, business considerations do. The little wars are either carefully contrived distractions or planned business opportunities.
Can we please stop acting surprised or indignant? Can we drop the naivety and faux indignation?
There is nothing, repeat: nothing, we common folk can do about it in any meaningful way. Activists get jailed or executed, and dangerous rebellions get violently crushed. Whistle-blowers are eliminated or discredited as paranoid. Realists are ridiculed as delusional. Big Brother has won. Deal with it.
Unless and until the whole rotten global finance system comes crashing down from its own weight, better for us to just snuggle up in our cubicles, play some WoW, and enjoy our tiny crumb of the big pie.
Honestly, do you, or a hundred thousand of you, think you can make any more than an inconvenient dent in the global money machine?
The petty details of government and corporate skullduggery that make it into the news are insignificant in scale and inadequate in perspective.
Resistance is futile. Enjoy our brave new world.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, said Fred, and of course the truth of the matter is that there will always be innovative attacks that require cutting-edge defenses. Hail our new IT Overlords.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Chinese hacking you? You don't say? They have been messing with us for as long as I can remember. They will ding your firewall so many times that it stops being amusing and starts to give one a nasty attitude. Let's couple that with how they will hack your MMO accounts, rip off your items, sell them to venders if they have to so that they can farm gold. The way they disrespect us by messing with our gaming culture to me is rude. We don't go messing with their entertainment, or messing with their computers. To me it shows how disrespectful, and antagonistic they are.
I think we should hammer them for it. They are way overdue for retribution of the nastiest sort in my opinion.
Did you really just advocate a declaration of war against China because your purples were disenchanted?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Maybe... create a DMZ with the DMZ being tons of Chinese propaganda, using a Chinese-based Linux OS as the server, and have the default language/locale be Chinese. Then create a fake semi-difficult/easy server behind the DMZ set up similarly. Finally, your true server is behind all of this. That way when they login they think they're accidentally attacking a Chinese comrade server or it has already been hacked!
The G
They're just worried that the US won't ship them our coal or Canada's oil.
Maybe we should cease providing naval, air, and land military protection for China's resource extraction industries worldwide?
I'm down with that.
You spy. We let you die.
Fair trade.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They're going to have to rename the Streissand Effect to the Wen Jiabao Effect because this is bigger. Did they really think they could get away with this? There's going to probably be 24/7 news coverage, an entire 60 minutes episode on what a jackass him and his crooked family are, entire websites dedicated to this, and probably 100 stories about him in each of the newspapers this affected. I'd put that jackass on the cover for a week straight if I owned that paper.
Perhaps now, someone in the ivory tower will see how vulnerable we really are.
This is not a 'china is bad' story but rather a 'US Corporate Security Sucks' story and it should be.
There will always be baddies trying to get in. We need to be the best in the world at stopping them.
Right now, I am sad to report, we are not.
-badford
Get back to us when you're old enough to drive.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
These Advanced Persistent Threats are quite frightening, but would having users run Linux desktops not mitigate it if not negate it completely?
After all, opening a PDF wouldn't likely execute any code, attachments would have to have the extra step of making them *executable* before they'd run, regardless of the extension (i.e. nekkidboobs.jpg.exe would simply not work)
I can't help but think that it would force the attackers to target another vector; one much more difficult, i.e. holes in web-facing server scripts.
Anyone able to shed some light on APTs and Linux?
It would appear so on the surface, but let's delve a bit deeper. I see a poster below had given some reasons as well. Let me add mine. China, I believe has be subversively engaging us in trade wars. Our debt to them is not what I would call an act of kindness. I am talking about the flooding of our markets with goods produced at a labor cost that drives American industry into the dirt, taking along with it our economy. I feel one needs to equate these acts of damage to that of warfare, because one doesn't need bombs and guns to destroy or subjugate a nation.
Now I can understand the grand struggle between nations and cultures. China is a very old nation, and perhaps hails the oldest of civilizations on the planet. It pains me greatly that our intellects aren't sharing, and helping each other thrive as good friends and neighbors. What disappoints me most is these personal attacks upon the personage of our country. These "cyber attacks" aren't something new. They antagonistic and exploitative in nature. I am a great admirer of Asian culture in general with its social structures, its respect for elders, and its well defined sense of honor.
What I am not appreciative of is the disrespect show to us as a people; I can understand the struggle between the authorities and the powers that be. But these attacks are done so with impunity, they are winked at and possibly patriotic to them. I don't believe that these are so much done by the State as much as they are by lesser entities, factions, individuals. Their State has been accused of backing this or at least with the "Great Firewall of China", they should know about it.
This to me, shows a contempt for us all, from head to toe from China. I do not think that they have an iota of respect for us, because if they did, they wouldn't insult our culture on a personal level. (Blowing up my Purples for puny amounts of Gold, I would knock your teeth out with my fist if you did that near me IRL.) That is a cultural insult, and it's coming from a culture that understands respect and honor, yet blatantly saying "FUCK YOU" with their continuous, and growing more bolder actions of aggression in this realm that they seem to think they can act from with impunity.
I'm not advocating we carpet bomb them all to hell with thermal nukes, but I am saying we need to "Fuck them up!" Something to the equivalent of knocking someone flat on their ass when they are doing offensive actions that compel any normal person to react. I think if we don't, they will perceive it as weakness, and it will encourage them to be bolder and more aggressive towards us to what ends, it's anyone's guess. We need a well thought out, appropriate response, that brings about in the long run, peace and enlightenment for all. I learned as a child that sometimes you have to knock someone's block off, and you would be amazed at how agreeable and down right friendly and cooperative they can be afterwards.
Take the Red Pill.
The long-term goal of Communist Red Chinese is to take over the wealth creation resources of the planet. The quasi merger between the authoritarian Maoists and the global capitalists plays out as a sorry act in the Beijing Red Theater. The performance designed to distract and confuse really has the destruction of Western economies as the climax. The sell out of the West, under the skilled dirty hands of Herr Heinz Henry A. Kissinger, is entering the final stages of a planned implosion. Now that the de-industrialization of America as described in the article, Free Trade Created the Chinese Model, has taken placed, the theft of our natural assets is the next to go. The Chinese exploits the use of U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones. A depiction of the function and working of such Foreign-Trade Zones follows:
"Other countries around the world have Free Trade Zones that are often confused with the U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones program. While there are similarities, the FTZ program is very different from other countries' Free Trade Zone. In a number of "free trade zones" in other countries – particularly those in developing countries – the sole benefit is the avoidance of internal customs duties on products that are re-exported from the Free Trade Zone. Often, the goods are not even allowed to be sold in the country where the Free Trade Zone exists. You often here these zones referred to as "Export Processing Zones". The U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones program not only allows the sale and importation of merchandise to the U.S. Commerce, but in many cases enables companies to reduce or eliminate duties on products manufactured for domestic consumption. This relief from inverted-tariff benefit is one of the key distinctions between the U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones program and other countries Free Trade Zone programs. Generally Free Trade Zones offer significantly less opportunity for benefits and tariff savings. As previously mentioned, in many cases you must actually export all the merchandise you bring into a Free Trade Zone (if it is a Export Processing Zone. In other cases, importation is allowed, but not manufacturing of merchandise. Under the U.S. FTZ program, companies can obtain FTZ benefits such as, duty exemption on re-exports, duty elimination on waste, scrap, and yield loss, duty exemption on damaged, or nonconforming items, reduction in merchandise processing fees (MPF) and brokerage fees through weekly entry, cash flow savings, and relief from ad valorem tax, and the previously described relief from inverted tariffs."
Watch the video, Chinese Move Into Foreign Trade Zones On American Land, for an informative discussion on the effects that allow wholesale entry of Red Chinese companies to operate on American soil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w2rmuKHlU3A
A previous Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert is available on the WND report, CHINA INVADES U.S. WITH 'FREE-TRADE ZONES' which documents an additional twist to the economic treason that the political class is foisting on our country. "A plan being pushed by the Chinese Central Bank would set up "development zones" in the United States that would allow China to "establish Chinese-owned businesses and bring in its citizens to the U.S. to work." Under the plan, some of the $1.17 trillion that the U.S. owes China would be converted from debt to "equity". As a result, "China would own U.S. businesses, U.S. infrastructure and U.S. high-value land, all with a U.S. government guarantee against loss." Does all of this sound far-fetched? Well, it isn’t. In fact, the economic colonization of America is already far more advanced than most Americans would dare to imagine."
Another Dr. Corsi assertion is outlined in the Market Daily News article; Does China Plan To Establish Chinese Cities And Special Economic Zones All Over America?
> the attacks were 'for the apparent purpose of monitoring the newspaper's China coverage'
Errrrrr... if the main activity of the "attacks" was to scrape articles about China and send them to servers in China (or somewhere else), did it occur to anybody that maybe... just MAYBE... the motive of the hacker(s) might have been to obtain copies of articles that they can't reliably read via normal means courtesy of the Great Firewall of China (or they don't feel like paying for, or they literally CAN'T pay for because the subscription system rejects them and won't allow them to subscribe or pay by some means readily available to them)?
Seriously. In case anybody hasn't noticed, there's been an upswing lately in seemingly-pointless (to Americans) content-aggregation sites that do little more than scrape content from American sites that have a habit of getting randomly blocked by Chinese ISPs (like Wikipedia, XDA-Developers.com, and StackOverflow.com) or sit behind paywalls (like WSJ), then regurgitate it... with ads stripped out, and more importantly, no NEW ads inserted)? Inevitably, from some domain whose name vaguely resembles some plausible combination of English words, but appears to be nonsensical (making up an example, something like "blueteapot.org")?
Remember, when you're ~12-20 years old, just about anything that someone in a position of authority says you aren't allowed to have/read/do instantly becomes your #1 goal in life to obtain. Chinese adults might be largely indifferent to the Great Firewall, but nerdy Chinese teenagers hate it with a passion the moment they find out the real reason why sites mysteriously quit working for no obvious reason... especially when they're trying to finish their Java programming homework, and discover that some idiot decided to block StackOverflow this week.
Of course, it *could* also just be that some powerful/wealthy Chinese official got pissed off about something the WSJ wrote, and paid a bunch of hackers to get revenge for him, but when I see an "attack" whose main consequence is the scraping and republishing of content likely to be of interest to people in China, my first thought is, "sigh... the things those poor guys have to do to get around the Great Firewall..."
Woosh!
Since this is the second news paper that got seriously pwned, I wonder why they had to hire private help to figure all this out. Isn't this exactly why the USA pays oodles of tax money to the NSA for? Are we going to get a TSA equivalent for the Internet to prevent this happening in the future?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
You've somewhat hit the nail on the head with your subject line. As it turns out, the more democratic western countries are the ones most as risk of some sort of major cyber-based disaster because there quite simply is no separation from of our networks from the world-- not that I agreed with it, but this is in part what SOPA was about. Countries like China or Iran or Cuba that can just cut off access from the outside world are at a supreme advantage.
That said, the long-term solution is that our critical infrastructure (private and public) needs to be taken off of the internet and we need to build a national red network. The problem is the cost and logistics of that would be astounding, however I like to put it in terms of building a national highway system as a means of easing unemployment and boosting the economy, and in this case it would also provide us a fair degree of extra protection, but it will never get done because of the costs
I know a lot of people see it as fear-mongering, but we really do have a significant and real threat of a crippling cyber attack. (many of those same people arent really qualified to speak on computers, despite what their X years as a sysadmin and tech support makes them think)
Isn't WSJ owned by Rupert Murdoch, famous spy-master? They certainly know how to recognise hacking if anyone does.
...possibly connected to China's military...
I call FUD on this one. To me it seems just as valid to suggest that they were "possibly connected to [Israel|Iraq|North Korea|...]'s military". Spoofing IP addresses or using a hacked computer in another country are some of the oldest tricks in the book; even I can do that. And so is lying in newpaper articles; of course, the Murdochs would never do that.
Was that the Enterprise whooshing by???
Seems they've been monitoring that pretty closely.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The Onion, America's Finest News Source, reports that it's cooperating with the Chinese government by giving them its employees' passwords. So it's not just the NYT and WSJ.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks