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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.'"
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.
Because that would also inhibit all the internet spying that everyone else is doing to the Chinese.
And the worms ate into his brain.
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.
...they could have set up the newspaper as a honeypot.
well, only in China you have to be a military hacker to read wall street journal.
they're probably interested in sources though. should just give them bullshit sources.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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
> Under the plan, some of the $1.17 trillion that the U.S. owes China would be converted from debt to "equity".
And right there, that's how you know the entire "plan" is pure bullshit. The US doesn't "owe" China anything besides some quantity of $100 (or larger, should the Fed choose to print them) bills -- hundred-dollar bills the Fed can print at will, in any quantity necessary -- once the bonds purchased by Chinese investors (or its government) reach maturity. Period.
US debt is dollar-denominated. US Treasury bonds say right on them that they're payable upon maturity for some quantity of dollars, and the Fed can print as many as it needs to. It's literally impossible for the US to default on its debt absent intentional sabotage by grandstanding elected officials.
The whole act of printing bonds & pretending they're a loan of some kind is theater whose purpose is to keep the amount of dollars growing, while simultaneously limiting the total dollars in active circulation, by encouraging investors to keep reinvesting matured bonds in new bonds.
So, what's to stop China from cashing in on them and collecting its mountain of $100 (or larger) bills? The logistics of trying to move around a hundred billion $100 bills (or 100 million $100,000 bills) and figure out what to DO with them, and the instant collapse in value they'd see that made 90% of their investment worthless if they tried to dump even a small fraction of them too quickly.
It's the same reason why guys who have millions of Bitcoins can't turn them into millions of dollars overnight -- there's a limit to the number of Bitcoins the market can absorb in any given day, and if the market were flooded with them, the amount people would pay for them would plummet quickly. Even if they tried to go on a real estate buying spree, spending even a hundred billion dollars on tangible goods & real estate is HARD.
Things like a 747 might be a few hundred million dollars, but there are only so many 747s available to buy in any given year. If you went to Boeing and said, "I'd like to buy a thousand 787 Dreamliners next year, with remote controls so I can have them take off, then crash them into the desert for my personal entertainment", they'd laugh at you. Well... ok, at this point, they'd probably be delighted to sell you a dozen or two, but their annual production capacity is finite. To get as many as you want, you'd literally have to build a dozen (or more) new factories for them.
Ditto for skyscrapers. To really invest hundreds of billions of dollars in skyscrapers, they'd have to start brand new companies to acquire land, pay people to build them, and find enough places that would even allow them to build them in the first place. And after a certain point, they're going to run out of small towns who'll say yes to almost anything, and the zoning department is going to start saying 'no, you can't build another 90 story building... there's already 37 buildings with 80 or more stories under construction in downtown [Macon/Cedar Rapids/Ocala/Modesto/Youngstown/Reno], and frankly, it's a good thing 89% of those buildings are going to be vacant, because we don't actually *have* the city infrastructure to handle even a fraction of the people who could theoretically live and/or work in the buildings we've already approved, anyway. Now, if you're interested in building our city a subway system, and rebuilding the interstate as a double-deck 24-lane highway with braided ramps at your expense to gain additional development rights...."
Investing billions of dollars in companies by buying stock is even harder than buying goods and skyscrapers. Warren Buffet has written about this problem quite often. When you have THAT MUCH money to invest, there really aren't very many companies that are big enough, with enough shares of sufficiently-expensive stock that's not over-valued, for you to buy enough stock to be worth your time and effort before the share price begins to skyrocket and make it too expensive to be a good investment
NSA does have that mission. Cybercom doesn't even have that mission. No govt entity has the mission to protect civilian cyber infrastructure. And when Cybercom has tried to get companies to beef up their security, they pushed back. Do you really want the govt to come in and tell you how to set up your networks, passwords, etc in your company?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.