China's Foreign Ministry: China Did Not Attack Github, We Are the Major Victims

An anonymous reader writes At the Regular Press Conference on March 30, China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying responded on the charge of DDoS attack over Github. She said: "It is quite odd that every time a website in the US or any other country is under attack, there will be speculation that Chinese hackers are behind it. I'd like to remind you that China is one of the major victims of cyber attacks. We have been underlining that China hopes to work with the international community to speed up the making of international rules and jointly keep the cyber space peaceful, secure, open and cooperative. It is hoped that all parties can work in concert to address hacker attacks in a positive and constructive manner."

Comments

Plausible Deniability

[Spy Handler]

except in this case it's not so plausible.

On the other hand NSA denying it created Stuxnet isn't all that plausible either.

Re:Plausible Deniability

[Tablizer]

Did they officially deny creating Stuxnet? I vaguely remember them saying something like "We don't comment on such as is our policy, and thus won't confirm nor deny".

Re:Plausible Deniability

[HiThere]

Well, it's actually quite plausible. That doesn't mean you should believe it. Lots of things are believable that aren't true.

The interesting thing is, I can't think of how they could either make it believable that they did it or that they didn't do it. In some things there are no good grounds for having a belief in either (any) direction.

The thing is, all the governments I've paid any attention to lie so often that you would do well to use a roulette wheel to decide HOW they are lying in any particular statement. And "They're telling the truth" would be the 00 slot of the wheel. But belief should occur only when there is reasonably grounded evidence...and then it shouldn't be committed belief, because governments are quite able to fabricate evidence when they find it worth the effort.

Proof

[Coren22]

Where is their counter to the proof offered during the attack? As I recall the DDoS was caused by requests to the Chinese search engine from outside China.

Re:Proof

[AmiMoJo]

Neither side has presented any convincing evidence. This is just going to keep happening because it's so hard to accurately trace cyber attacks.

Re:Proof

[Coren22]

http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

Original story, it goes through the mechanism in use right in the summary. It is quite clear that queries to Baidu from outside the great firewall were triggering requests to GitHub.

Re:Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither side has presented any convincing evidence. This is just going to keep happening because it's so hard to accurately trace cyber attacks.

Yep, so hard to accurately trace cyber attacks. But if you had read anything at all on this particular attack:

Mikko Hyponen, the chief research officer of cybersecurity firm F-Secure, said the attack was likely to have involved Chinese authorities because the hackers were able to manipulate Web traffic at a high level of China’s Internet infrastructure. It appeared to be a new type for China, he added. “It had to be someone who had the ability to tamper with all the Internet traffic coming into China.” he said.

Though Baidu is the largest search engine in China by several measures, the attack appeared to use traffic from its users outside the country, security experts said. When a user navigated to the Baidu search engine, they said, a code was activated that sent continuous requests for data from the user’s computer to GitHub. By tapping overseas users, the hackers made the attack harder to block, because the requests to GitHub came from all over the world and looked like typical requests for information.

And also the motive is very clear for China to attack Github. Not so clear for anyone else.

Re:Proof

[tnk1]

Yes, but it also implies that someone has a goal in mind by framing China. Either to hide their own activities or to make China look bad.

Who else has the motive to take down GitHub? Organized crime could, but what do they get out of it? The US Government could, but what would the goal be?

Unless someone provides motives for other players at that level to make that attack, it's probably China. Simple internet trolls might know how to operate such an attack but probably not the capacity to perform it.

Re:Proof

[dos1]

But the actual traffic is international and there's nothing odd in it. It's the actual source of the attack - the hijacked Baidu script that changed non-Chinese visitors of Chinese pages into botnet (well, not really, but very botnet-like) nodes instructed to attack GitHub - that without any doubt came from the Great Firewall of China. It might not be the government, but unless there's a massive man-in-the-middle attack covering the whole non-Chinese Internet, it's definitely something that comes from China.

Translation:

[Verloc]

"We are not hacking because we get hacked a lot"

The 'logic' here is... not good.

Re:Translation:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not their logic that is not good, it's your summary that is not good. They aren't saying that the fact that they get hacked a lot proves that they don't hack. They're saying that a lot of people jump to the conclusion that any hacking incident must be from China in spite of the fact that they're are a lot of hackers are from outside of China. The point of saying that they are often the victim of hacking is to emphasize that there are non-Chinese hackers.

I would not be surprised...

[ckatko]

...If it was USA/Israel/Britain/Canada pulling yet another False Flag operation of saying "OMGAWD Asians did it!".

For those who missed it, Canada outright admitted it they do this.

Re:I would not be surprised...

[dos1]

Have you even checked how this attack looks like? The traffic is *NOT* coming from Chinese servers, but that's not the point. That's actually why it's so powerful. Baidu serves the malicious JavaScript in place of their analytics tracking script. Inside of China it's normal, but when it goes through the Great Firewall it gets changed to malicious script that turns any visitors of webpages with Baidu script (Google Analytics equivalent) attached to them into part of DDoS. The way that script worked initially was actually pretty hilarious. It attached new tag to the page with src attribute being github URL. This allowed github to replace content under those URLs to "alert('WARNING: malicious script detected');", which got executed in every browser that was turned into an attacker (and due to blocking nature of alert, limiting the impact). Of course there's more to that and the techniques used by attackers changed over past days - for instance, now TCP SYN floods started as well. But the fact is that there's definitely some big Chinese player behind it, even if it's actually not the most likely one - the government.

Re:I would not be surprised...

[dos1]

the <script> tag*

Mistakenly turned on the HTML formatting. Hopefully it's still readable without the new lines :P

Not much said

[PineHall]

Here is the question and answer:

Second, a report says that a US website was under hacker attack, and the source of the attack was from China. How do you respond?

On your second question, it is quite odd that every time a website in the US or any other country is under attack, there will be speculation that Chinese hackers are behind it. I'd like to remind you that China is one of the major victims of cyber attacks. We have been underlining that China hopes to work with the international community to speed up the making of international rules and jointly keep the cyber space peaceful, secure, open and cooperative. It is hoped that all parties can work in concert to address hacker attacks in a positive and constructive manner.

Finally

[Megahard]

We have someone to take the place of the Iraqi Information Minister. I miss that guy.

Always deny

[ITRambo]

Russia and China are reliable liars when it comes to denying what others have caught them doing. Very much like a child that got caught with a hand in the cookie jar. I do not believe denials that come out of either country.

Re:Always deny

[Flavianoep]

Russia, China, as well as any intelligence agency in the world, are reliable liars when it comes to denying what others have caught them doing.

FTFY.

All parties?

[rippeltippel]

"It is hoped that all parties can work in concert to address hacker attacks in a positive and constructive manner."

...all parties? I thought there was just one.

Re: Yeah, sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait...really? You'd don't believe the NSA but you'll believe a government official from a country that has killed millions of its OWN people? Wow. I mean, NSA basically stands for National Shitfilled Agency, but I'll believe them in a heartbeat over these buggers.

Look up mass murder by communist regimes. Look up what happened to the democracy movement in China. Well, assuming you aren't in China, where you aren't free to to so.

Get your head out of your rear and actually get a clear picture of the regime in China. The NSA may not be the good guys...but the Chinese regime actually IS the bad guys. They only look good in comparison to Pol Pot and the Kim regimes.

Hilarious defense

[MikeRT]

Your honor, I'd like to remind you that as a member of the Crips, my client is constantly facing risks to his life including up to being gunned down in the street. Therefore he clearly could not have committed that drive by shooting of the Bloods.

If they don't want to be blamed...

[ilsaloving]

If they don't want to continually be blamed for attacking various web properties, then maybe they should... I dunno.... stop attacking various web properties?

Quick, get damage control out here

[LordLimecat]

One wonders if we'll be seeing the return of the 50 Cent Party in this thread.