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U.S. Calls On China To End Hacking; Start Cyberspace Dialogue
New submitter trickymyth writes "For the first time, the United States has mentioned the People's Republic of China in relation to cyber crime, officially acknowledging what has been long suspected by private security experts and the U.S. business community. The Obama Administration seeks to get the Chinese government to acknowledge the problem, to cease any state-sponsored hacker activity, and to start a dialogue on normative behavior on the internet. This announcement follows the recent 60-page report from the American cybersecurity firm Mandiant, who spent two years compiling evidence against the so-called 'Comment Crew.' They traced IP addresses, common behavior, and tools to track the group's activity, which led to a Shanghai neighborhood home to the People's Liberation Army (PLA's) Unit 61398. This tracking came at the behest of the Times, who has experienced some trouble with hacking in the past. The Chinese government rejected the report as 'unprofessional' and 'lacking technical evidence.' This announcement also comes amid a delicate leadership transition in China and numerous new reports on the vulnerability of U.S. business and government networks to attack."
This is the same country they has a national firewall infrastructure to use against its own citzens. I'm sure their morals will guide them right when it comes to using hacking as a weapon of war.
I hope this ends well, but I have a feeling that either nothing will come out of this, or the Chinese will ramp up efforts since they don't have to worry about hiding their efforts.
We can not allow a cyberspace gap!
The whole foreign policy of the USA in a nutshell.
the desire to ship a product to maximize revenue rather than quality is the objective of many companies. The license agreements are better coded than most software.
It's ok for the US but no one else?
Guess some left hand isn't talking to the right hand.
Infuriate left and right
Surely the U.S is hacking back?
Yeah sure! Now where did i put my netbus...
Silly Times, if you are scared of the Chinese hackers, you can just insert this code at the top of your site:
< h1 > tiananmen square < /h1 >
China is about to have an epic crash when their real estate bubble bursts:
60 minutes on China Real Estate Bubble
When that happens, their economy will tank... similar to what happened in U.S. in 2008. And that will bring out people demonstrating in the streets. The Chinese security apparatus will have its hands full trying to stifle online dissent and stop people from plotting against the government. Cyber attacks on external targets will fade.
yep, because there's no way sending a remote controlled robot after a team of hackers could go wrong.
I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment. JFK 1961 ppl who who don't know history are doomed to repeat it
Call me hypocritical, but preventing Iran from having a nuclear bomb for the safety of the middle eastern region (and global security) is definitely worthwhile.
What is the purpose of China's hacks? Mostly economical, not exactly an apples to apples comparison here.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Um, the "firewall" in China is mostly to keep Chinese from getting out, not others from getting in. I assure you, systems in China are hacked all the time. Mostly for things like botnet recruitment, of course.
the U.S. WILL go in and do what is in their best interest.
I don't know why I have a feeling that US'es best interest is to fix their security flaws. Otherwise... what, will you do the same when e.g. Belarus (as a country) or a group of Russian hackers (acting "in private name") decides they'd like to test US tubez?
Or is one of your kinky pleasures to pay taxes that will end into the bank accounts of the "defense industry"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Besides any asimmetric warfare scenario it ever encountered.
asimmetric
*asymmetric*
So true. It'd be like if the US wanted to go into talks with China to agree to stop spying on each other. Really? That's just not going to go anywhere. These are just countries looking after their best interests abroad. Why should they stop? Give me one good reason. (morals don't count. morals never count on a national scale, only things that get results count where entire nations are concerned)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You know, the US could just turn off their overseas Internet connectivity and isolate itself. Or you know, be part of the international community and accept they are no more special than any other netizen with attempted hacks on their IP addresses.
Any headline where the US is demanding that some other country stop doing something can be simply answered with "You First Sparky!".
How could any government control the actions of 1 billion people....oh wait a minute.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Seems to me that this is like asking for a truce when we're losing. They've got no reason to say yes.
Fortunately, this isn't a battle we have to lose. Yeah, I think we have to admit that every grandma-box running Windows 98 is going to be a spam-spewing zombie for the foreseeable future, but the corporations that make the juiciest targets should also be capable of at least some self-defense. If thy IP block offends thee, cut it off. Social engineering is always going to trump user education, but we can at least make it an arms race.
At least it's not nukes, which are harder to walk away from. That means we also don't have Mutually Assured Destruction. They're going to do it even if they sign a treaty saying that they won't, so we're going to have to hunker down and deal. Asking them to call it a draw isn't going to get us anywhere.
Wrong analogy. This one is "you don't attack us, and we keep attacking you", or maybe "my data is only mine, and your data is ours". Or even maybe "you stop your attacks, and we jail our hackers" (and those "hackers" are the ones that hack against us, not for us, be pirates, people that fight for people rights, or whoever disclose government/corporations abuses)
Looks like governments start noticing that 'the terrorists' are no longer an effective bogeyman and need to conjure up a new one.
Nihil in publicum sputa.
All the US needs to do, is sit back and wait for these Chinese hackers to download too much copyrighted material. Just wait, it'll happen soon enough. Then their ISP will cut down China's bandwidth to like, really really slow. They won't be able to really get any hacking done then.
Imagine it's 2003, and Slashdot has an article about the widely criticized Iraqi invasion. An American makes a post just like yours:
"But invading Kuwait was ok, huh?"
Would you have embraced that sentiment? Would the moderators have modded it up?
I imagine that poster would be flooded with indignant replies containing variations of "two wrongs don't make a right"
Now imagine again that it's 2003. We know that North Korea is close to getting nukes, and their leader is literally insane. Far away, we have a bit of unreliable intelligence from some dude that was tortured and told us Saddam had WMDs, that we know is unreliable (because the guys that tortured him and told us about it also told us that it was unreliable). We also know that even if these WMDs do exist, they are not nukes. Also, unlike North Korea, Saddam was a major asshole but was not actually literally insane (at least not more than any other asshole politician). We know that if we take Saddam's regime out, we'll have to be there for a very, very long time to prevent an even bigger asshole from taking over. Meanwhile, our friends in South Korea would be happy to take over North Korea if we took out Kim Jong-Il's regime, and unite North and South Korea, significantly helping the entire population of North Korea.
10 Years prior, your daddy (president at that time) and your current VP (Secretary of Defense at that time) had both said invading Iraq to go after Saddam would have been obviously stupid. Your current VP even explained why it would be utterly stupid in an interview with C-SPAN in 1994.
Which country do you invade?
And the bartender says...
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
"You first, fuckers!"
I think we can all see where this is headed...
Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't know why I have a feeling that US'es best interest is to fix their security flaws.
Fix... the flaws? But... that would be like... shipping products which were warranted to be of merchantable fitness! It would require mandatory code regression analysis and testing which might cost money and would certainly create jobs! You're asking the software industry to submit to invasive scrutiny from the same kind of Government jackboots that the food, banking and building industries now tremble under daily! And that's socialism.
The only thing that can stop a black hat with a rootkit is a white hat with a rootkit!
If you outlaw shoddy, worthless software containing a million zero-day exploits, only outlaws will be exploited!
You'll take my imperative thread-based unsafe self-modifying code from my cold dead FATAL EXCEPTION AT 00FE:4358 SYSTEM HALTED!
In conclusion, I support Mom, apple pie, and an American software developer's inalienable right to immediately patent and ship whatever string of line noise can be coerced to come out the other end of a rusty, sawn-off C++ compiler, and my esteemed opponent does not.
I know I can trust you all to vote with your hearts.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
China has been hacking US gamers for years. I get notifications from Guild Wars 2 that someone in China tried to access my account, please change my password. Welcome to the world wide web, Mr President and Congress, we need smarter policies, not more neolithic special interests pandering bullshit. Set up a firewall that you can monitor the hits on it, you will find that China is a beehive of hacker activity.
We do have people highly qualified and capable of not only securing our country's systems, but being our scalpel as well. Let's not panic for fuck's sake.
Take the Red Pill.
"We are not hacking. Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
(Guard 2 whispers): "Are they leaving?"
"I told them we weren't hacking." (Both snicker.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That's what the US State Dept is crying over in Beijing right now.
The Obama administration really needs to learn some tact. Did they really need to launch this initiative RIGHT now? Could it not have waited 6 months since it has taken them 2+ years so far to gather the evidence? The Chinese government has always used the "it wasn't me" and "As I told you, it would be absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable" arguments. All this will do is raise their hackles while we deal with a true international crisis that we need and have finally started getting China's help on, a.k.a. illegal North Korea nuclear capabilities.
At least with the hacking problems, that is something we can work on internally to resolve through better security measures. NK going nuclear, that is nothing we can fix by ourselves without severe global consequences.
Issue sanctions? Stop it, it hurts to laugh.
1. Some company gets hacked
2. Some security company (Mandiant) investigates and makes a non-peer-reviewed report (PDF) with very thin evidence that jumps to conclusions
3. Sensational press repeats claims from report without investigating
4. Government uses "evidence" of what now seems a big problem and a certain source to start a war
5. Profit...
I'd like some smart Slashdot reader to read the report and tell us what you think. It contains a lot of random facts and then draws some very unscientific conclusions. I think it was written starting with the conclusions, then finding facts to "support" it.
Blocking overseas network traffic will just mean that the hackers will start using US based places to start hacking from. Just blocking China won't work since the hackers almost exclusively use intermediate (hacked) computers that are not in China to do their stuff from. The fact that China isn't really hiding their economic hacking doesn't mean that other countries aren't doing just that as well. Don't forget that commerce and government are more or less the same in "communist" China. This is nothing but industrial espionage, which takes place everywhere, not just in China-USA. The real difference is that in this case the owners of the industry aren't people claiming to be private citizens in a claimed democracy. You're basically fighting a very powerful economy that happens to be a lot more efficient at their corruption than the the US economy is, with the exception of the arms industry.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
China owns the US
China owns networks in the US
China has complete visibility of everything that happens in the US
We surrender. Please don't hurt us.
Spot on. The cyber-warfare rhetoric has been in an upward spiral for ages, but now they're even dumping money into hollywood for the full fear-mongering propaganda treatment (Skyfall, anyone?). "We don't know who our enemies are. They work in the shadows, so we must work in the shadows." Probably the closest you could ever come to an honest policy statement.
There aren't any credible visible threats, so we're being indoctrinated to believe in invisible monsters. My fellow Canadians might resonate with our recent "rise in unreported crime" as justification for building new prisons...
Iran hasn't invaded any countries in an aggressive war of choice in 200 years. As opposed to you-know-who.
China ignores all their treaties. For example, they recently joined the UN in condemning NK and promising that they would stop NK's slush fund if found. OK. So, America obviously KNEW where it was and points it out. What does China do? Nothing.
Then you have their treaty with USA and WTO. They were required to drop most of their tariffs (around 90 at the time), no subsidies for exported goods, no dumping of exported goods, and free their money. Instead, they now have over 400 tariffs, subsidize many key items, are constantly dumping in foreign nations, and manipulate their money.
Likewise, they have a treaty with Japan that requires them to have pollution control on all new cement and coal plants. Sadly, the Japanese made a mistake in not requiring them to turn on the controls. As such, China simply turns off the controls most of the time. They only turn it on when Chinese gov. tells that they must and for how long (typically a special event or somebody coming to check the environment).
And now somebody thinks that CHina will keep their word? Not a chance.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...get their Most Favored Nation status taken away.
I'm sorry, we don't serve whales here....
I know China isn't going to stop. You know China isn't going to stop. Obama knows China isn't going to stop. China sure as hell knows it's not going to stop. So most likely this is grandstanding so Obama can say he's "doing something" to his more clueless buddies in business.
USA: Syn(100) -------> China
Your move China.
USA: <----------- TCP_RST(100) China
While everyone is crying politics... did everyone forget about all of the god damn sshd and email password cracking on random targets by Chinese ip space?
So what incentives exactly does China have to stop hacking? Stop a cyber war? Their hackers are better than yours. Afraid after sanctions? It's unlikely enough countries would be willing to stop trading. Best thing to do imo is to upgrade US's digital infrastructure. Solve the root of the problem.
"We are not hacking. Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
(Guard 2 whispers): "Are they leaving?"
"I told them we weren't hacking." (Both snicker.)
Begin dialog
Fuck you!
End dialog
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I bet a long list of security appliance manufacturers are sweating bullets after reading this.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
Yeah guys no fair, your only allowed to hack the evil terrorist countries.
Rocket Surgeon.
President Obama and his administration has raised the level of urgency in protecting the government and domestic businesses from the increased level of cyber attacks. However, U.S. leaders have avoided calling China out by name in the past. http://www.cuuhomaytinh.info/
http://www.cuuhomaytinh.info/
We can ask till we are blue in the face. Unless we get something on them that is without refute, nothing will change. Even then, if we did have something like that it would be handled in a very hush-hush manner as to not hurt someones feelings in the international community; it will be back-door. We need to upgrade our security, or just outright ban foreign IPs from certain companies. This is one of those problems where there really isn't a good solution.