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China Criticizes US For Making Weapon Plans Steal-able, Alleges Attacks From US
Etherwalk writes "Huang Chengqing, China's top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. 'We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it's not helpful in solving the problem.' Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. 'They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.' In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: 'Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'"
A few experts think China's more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations.
"This is what I was wearing when China stole my weapons schematics. Tell me I asked for it."
Fuck off with your victim blaming, China. Pricks.
Whilst I'm not saying China doesn't do any state sponsored hacking I've pointed out before that China has the largest online population of any nation and has about 1/6th of the world's population. Statistically if you get non-state sponsored hackers in every nation it makes sense that you're going to see more from China than anywhere else.
It's quite possible that it's nothing to do with the US "going public" and everything to do with the fact that a large number of hack attacks from China against the US is pretty much a statistical certainty regardless of state actors being behind it or not.
I think all governments do state sponsored hacking, I certainly think China does, to what extent is unclear but I do think at least the claims against China are probably overhyped.
Which may not inherently be a bad thing anyway though I guess if it gets Western firms to take security a bit more seriously so maybe there's a silver lining regardless.
...that's why the US administration won't talk - they're the biggest money generator for the Military Industrial Complex.
Still waiting for the pin to drop in the US, all the while TV produces shows about terrorist threats, anyone that questions the government line being a conspiracy theorist (and therefore insane) and revolution being bad.
To harm China diplomatically and economically. If they get a reputation for underhanded spy games then businesses will be more reluctant to do business there for fear of having their designs shamelessly copied and research stolen, and nations will be less willing to allow free trade if it is known that China seeks to favor domestic industry by impeding the operations of overseas competition.
WalMart has outsourced the production of plastic flower pots and patio furniture to China for decades - the Chinese are simply reversing the process! By letting U.S. taxpayers fund the billions of dollars per year we pour into military R&D, they save massive amounts of money and man hours, and are guaranteed the best designs that 17 year old Chinese Red-Bull & Cheetos-fuelled hax0rs can steal.
Take a copy-catted F22 Raptor, paint a Chinese air force insignia on it, and * VOILA! * Fifth generation air superiority fighter MINUS the 20 years of research and testing.
What you say? Their copy is only 85% as good as ours because they made shortcuts in the radar, or avionics, or missile systems? That's OK, our congress will keep paring down the final platform order until our air force ends up only getting 200 F22s, while the Chinese will manufacture 1,150 of theirs.
The current US military philosophy is starting to look more and more like WW2 era Germany, with absolute faith placed in a relatively small number of extremely expensive, extremely high quality weapons systems, which ultimately were smothered and overrun by a developing nation (the U.S.) with phenomenal industrial capacity capable of running M4 tanks, jeeps, B17 bombers, and numerous other things off assembly lines faster than the Germans could destroy them.
The comparative ironies to today's military situation are incredible.
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The problem with this position is that they have HAD a bad reputation for stealing IP for over 20 years now. And it hasn't changed anything.
People still do business with them. People still ship designs and formulas to them to produce.
What will reduce IP Theft is higher chinese labor costs which make local manufacturing a better solution than offshoring. And we've probably got another 8 years before chinese wages + fuel transportation costs == local labor costs.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My father does a good job of capturing the sheer absurdity, I think.
Me: So, apparently China says that not only are we just as guilty of attacking them, but it's our own damn fault they were able to get at the data. ... I need a moment.
Him: Let me get this straight, China's response to our accusations of cyber-espionage is basically "I know I am, but what are you?"
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*