Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Government Is Behind a Decade of Hacks On Software Companies, Says Report (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers said Chinese intelligence officers are behind almost a decade's worth of network intrusions that use advanced malware to penetrate software and gaming companies in the US, Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. The hackers have struck as recently as March in a campaign that used phishing emails in an attempt to access corporate-sensitive Office 365 and Gmail accounts. In the process, they made serious operational security errors that revealed key information about their targets and possible location. Researchers from various security organizations have used a variety of names to assign responsibility for the hacks, including LEAD, BARIUM, Wicked Panda, GREF, PassCV, Axiom, and Winnti. In many cases, the researchers assumed the groups were distinct and unaffiliated. According to a 49-page report published Thursday, all of the attacks are the work of Chinese government's intelligence apparatus, which the report's authors dub the Winnti Umbrella. Researchers from 401TRG, the threat research and analysis team at security company ProtectWise, based the attribution on common network infrastructure, tactics, techniques, and procedures used in the attacks as well as operational security mistakes that revealed the possible location of individual members.
Don't let yourself be distracted, people — neither by electronic spying in TFA, nor by the other kind. The real and most prepossessing problem facing humanity in general and the US in particular is that a promiscuous man with bad hair is the President. #Resist!!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yes, China has been up to this sort of thing for many decades, and their government are the highest order of liars. They still send spies to our various institutions such as national laboratories, too. We are what we used to term 'ambivalent allies'. This is not news to most of us. Welcome to the realities of adult life. Somehow every single generation before your parents spoiled you for all time, managed to live our lives without wetting our pants, having temper tantrums, or insisting that the government make the entire world into a safe space due tour own personal shock or discomfort or inability tocope with the simplest of challenges. You can do the same, it's not too late to learn how to be a functional human being, but you'll have to give up your victimhood. You do not control nor are you the center of the universe. You control only yourself, and you could do about 1000 times better.
We'll just have to give tech companies hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of Indian contractors so they can secure there systems since they just don't don't have the money or expertise to do it themselves and they are just to important to let fail.
I mean, we here about this all the time, they go back and forth, nobody does anything and nothing comes from any of it.
Goats in the mountains smack their heads together too, in a similar vein these two incidents affect my life in equal manner.
Now if any one of them wants to actually take ANY form of action that would be interesting but since they are all just cock measuring each other with keyboards I am at a loss as to why I should care.
Btw, just exactly what am I supposed to be caring about here? Is this a new event? Can I build something with this information? Does this help me get more energy, filter my water, setup an AI to perform a task, reveal a new potential of possibility....or is this all just daytime drama like my fat momma used to love to watch with little to no purpose or point?
The truth hidden in the pudding? Public knowledge vs actually having proof...
Welp, another clickbaity content-free crapticle I can safely skip. Thanks, BeauHD!
And won't be nothin left but xit.
The tipoff was that their AI only speaks English.
You are crazy cat-lady times two. Are you retarded or what? I can't believe someone as stupid as you appear to be can survive in real life.
"Yes, China has been up to this sort of thing for many decades, and their government are the highest order of liars. "
Not sure how to evaluate given lying prevalence in most places but censorship seems like something liars would like for easier control.
Seriously, look at the history of prisoner atrocities commited by Asian captors. At some point you have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with these people.
That's the difference between the Chinese and the United States. We hack in support of our national defense. The Chinese hack to steal the negotiating strategy of Coca Cola in their upcoming talks to acquire a drinks company or to steal the plans for new commercial aircraft designs from Boeing. Trump is right to hit them with Tariffs. The government of China is totalitarian and controlled by thieves and liars. It's high time that we began treating them as such.
your life must be so pathetic for you to pretend to be APK for kicks. sad really. doesn't take much to entertain yourself, does it? what's tha matter, watching pain dry too much for your little brain? grow up!
Holy cow. I'm posting this after 15 posts have appeared an all of them are flamers and trolls. not a single engaging post. Is this some sort of chinese response to supress coherent discussion. I have a hard time thinking this is actually a representative sampling of slashdot. No I'm not new here. I'm being serious. this is slightly alarming and in a way news itself.
Now to distinguish this post I'll add some content here.
It's easily noticed that many countries accused of harboring state sponsored weaponization of the internet are also very concerned about putting up great firewalls around their country to distinguish inside and outside activity. While this might be attributed to an inward looking means of controlling a population that could if riled threaten the state one can see it another way. The fear is two fold. Outside agitators stirring up hate of the state government. the other is industrial and military espionage. And the reason to really fear either of those is if you know a thing or two about how easy the internet makes those. the more recent news about facebook and fake news sort of gives one pause to think that there's likely some connection to be made between those notions.
I'm not giving the US a pass on the potential for using the internet for mischief but I haven't yet noticed any efforts to seal off the US from the world and control what is said. Yes the creeping corporate nature of the internet news services is doing that all by itself but it's not driven by the state (just enabled by Amit pai for his own greedy reasons).
On the otherhand one could also decide to respond to this by crippling all trafic originating outside the US destined for the US. It would not be hermetic. Troll farms can just move their servers stateside, and people can view web pages hosted in other countries. But I probably would allow things to be more tracebale and if need be corralled or removed.
The US largely see a free internet as benefiting it's own economics, thus completely encicling the US with a great firewall would be a bad idea. But the economic benefits are also be true of other countries and will only become more dominant a concern. So punishment by IP address ostracism actually could be effective.
Besides one block of ip address assigned to China unicom, what other evidence do they have? Is it simply because many targets were political attacks?
This is not surprising. Anybody who is surprised by this is either an idiot, or one of those that work for these gov and are simply lying about it.
Yes, they are hitting the west VERY HARD. The amount of spying going on here is incredible.
Trump has it right in finally addressing CHina's economic war on America. Sadly, he is speaking about it, but really doing very little.
BUT, when he goes after allies at the same time, esp when they are NOT dumping on us, that is just insane.
It is time for the gov to start putting up real national security (i.e. go back to FBI doing the background checks), do decent checks on sub-contractors. etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and as always there is no solid evidence. They are just accusations that focus on a goal that is on the agenda. These days it's to accuse China and Russia for doing things they've never done, that you've done yourself for many years, and then accuse anyone of pointing out your hypocrisy for engaging in "whataboutism".
Nobody believes you any more.
The timing of this is weird. First we had terrorists which were the worst problem. Now the terrorism problem is maybe 100 times worse but now the Russians are taking over the world. Shouldn't we be giving it a bit more time before raising the Chinese to first enemy? I mean we haven't gotten the message yet 'never mind the russians here is the *real* enemy!'
insightful
Just being rhetorical, we know they don't have anything (or won't publish anything) on Huawei.
Wow fake APK is back. What a fag.
"UNIDENTIFIABLE WEASELS"
Hey, watch it with the racial insults.
If you follow the links you'll find that these people:
https://www.protectwise.com/company/
authored the report. Sounds quite fishy to me.
I think you misunderstand the economic realities, but, yes, if you want to protect yourself against the Chinese, those are reasonable actions. Unfortunately, it would be wise to secure your utility networks, etc. before action. And economically it would probably hurt the US a lot more than it hurt China. If you default on Chinese held securities your credit rating with everyone else will quickly drop to ZZZ, or less unless you've got solid grounds that THEY will accept. Even the less extreme action of freezing them until some "adjustment" is made would be likely to wreck your credit unless there is some exceptionally good reason with solid proof. And this isn't it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
BULLSHIT PROPAGANDA.
For these ten years, in order to maintain a working relationship with a bully, the US and their propaganda machine (the Mainstream Media) would blame North Korea (LOL) or some vague, nefarious nation-state. If the US wasn't directly responsible for the hacks themselves, the "nation-state of the day" would be used to remove any responsibility for the poor security practices employed by major firms (yahoo and others).
Punch a Nazi win a prize. I hope he goes down.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
So they are like, 2-3 decades behind the NSA? Surely they aren't THAT incompetent.
Captain Darling:
So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
General Melchett:
Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!
Captain Darling:
And fortunately, one of our spies...
General Melchett:
Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!
Who the hell modded this tripe up???
Just another day in Paradise
For a year, Slashdot has basically been a Trump and Russia bandwagon while completely ignoring the countless examples of China using nation-state sponsered hacks to steal BILLIONS in tech, weapons, and nuclear secrets while everyone in the media, congress, and Slashdot goes "russia! russia! russia!"
So, are we finally allowed to talk about the fact that China actually has a war machine "at parity" with the US military (and Russia doesn't), and that they make up over half of all internet attacks? (Russia doesn't.) And they literally were caught red handed directly financing a political party in the 90's nicknamed "Chinagate" and actual people went to jail? Oh, wait, but that was Bill Clinton and the Democratic party. I'm sorry. Please... I'm so sorry.
The Chinese go after anything with an open SSH port. On my server, I have no less than 500 Chinese IP addresses sitting on a ban list. My server is nothing exciting either. It just hosts my email and a blog - they have absolutely no information to gain whatsoever. They may even be trying to bruteforce my server in an attempt to assimilate it into a bot net. Well good luck, commies. I run OpenBSD. You'll have better luck moving on ...
Like most: not surprised. A coo-worker used to work at a "big ten" university. Every major holiday remote exploits from Asia would go through the roof. I guess they thought faculty would be at home unawares..
shocking article...lol. You have to be living in a cave if you think this is new.