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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate US Army Database, Compromise Safety of Dams
coolnumbr12 writes "Chinese hackers have infiltrated a sensitive U.S. Army database that contains information about the vulnerabilities of thousands of dams located throughout the United States. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams (NID) has raised concerns that information gathered in the hack could help China carry out a cyber-attack on the national electrical power grid."
From the article it isn't clear exactly what information was deemed sensitive. Does this information include very specific details (like, "here is the password to that plant's SCADA system?" Or does it cover broader details that the public had free access to prior to the September 11 attacks, such information now being withheld as "critical infrastructure information?"
Destroy the economy of your biggest customer. Thats a great way to stay in business.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I don't understand why anyone would want to connect really important things such as power plants and dams to the Internet. We have been running such things for about a century now and they work just fine. Anything behind a barbed wire fence should never be connected to the Internet. Why do people do this? Just for the convenience of some fat executive or lazy engineer who doesn't want to get his fat @$$ out of this office and see what is really going on with the machinery?
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
The vulnerabilities of the dams are the real problem, but for some reason the government prefers to lie about that. Most of these vulnerabilities are probably pretty obvious to an expert (and, yes, the Chinese have experts on damns and these can go to the US for vacation), so hiding these problems is pretty stupid in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's because if we actually made too big a stink, we'd have to deal with the dirty deeds we did in the first place to prompt such a response and the last thing we really want to do is to begin airing our dirty laundry. Grumbling under our breath about what a bunch of douches the Chinese are is about as far as we can go without having to scrape large amounts of egg off of our collective faces.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doesn't keep classified information on civilian projects online, do they? Electrical distribution control systems are not accessible over the internet, are they? It looks to me like someone, whether Chinese, Lebanese, or Portuguese, got some not-so-sensitive information from the Corps of Engineers site, and the U.S. government is using it in its publicity campaign to pass laws giving the government (gasp!) more control over the internet.
How about the Iranian scientist who was assassinated? People thought it was CIA/Mossad, but it turned out that he was working undercover for the US, and was assassinated by the Iranian intelligence service.
By your logic, that single event should exonerate the US for any future occurrences of assassination inside Iran.
“I know not what weapons world war III will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Albert Einstein
Yes, we might stop letting them lend us money!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
So there was no hacking involved. Simply someone handing out a password to a database to someone else who was not authorized.
It's called social engineering, and it is a well recognized hacking technique used in some infamous cases.
Since someone in the US Army or someone the Army authorized handed over the credentials you can hardly call it an act of war.
War, no. But it is still espionage apparently conducted by one of the last countries controlled by a Communist government whose officials periodically make public statements about attacking the United States with nuclear weapons.
The nature of the information they sought access to, and apparently obtained, isn't benign.
Dam - Sensitive Army database of U.S. dams compromised
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Not necessarily. There are many, many insecure servers and desktops in China and Taiwan; the language barrier, reliance on Windows XP, high rate of piracy (meaning patches rarely get applied) all combine to make it a humungous petri dish for malware and botnets. If you were trying to cover your tracks, it's be the logical place to vector your probes and attack through.
In this case you would get more insight from a calculator or spreadsheet than from cynicism. The US Cyber Command budget isn't that large compared to either the Air Force budget or the DoD budget. Finding some justification to bump it up wouldn't make much difference - it isn't going to be the tail that wags the dog.
Misplaced cynicism can also mislead you by pointing you in the wrong direction, as above. If you started digging into the question of Chinese espionage against the United States, you would quickly and easily lean that it is a huge effort against wide ranging targets. Why you would think this relatively minor event is in some way inconsistent wtih the total Chinese effort, and therefore not real, is baffling. Interesting who you effectively trust.
China also has more than 3,000 front companies in the U.S. “for the sole purpose of acquiring our technology,” . . .
Inside the Chinese Boom in Corporate Espionage
Chinese Army Directing Cyber Espionage Against Western Businesses
China military unit 'behind prolific hacking'
The China Problem
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell