Chinese Cyber (war)fare (merged thread)

[carl]

Even the New York Times is covering the report. Now that that bridge has been crossed it may only be 5 or 6 years until the US gov deigns to create a high level commission to study what might be done about the problem.

Adam G: I thought your idea a good one. But the scale and breadth of the Red Chinese effort is so huge, would the type of thing we did to the Russians work on them?

[The Cuyahoga Kid]

Apparently Unit 61398 doesn't approve of the beeb

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/bbc-ch...e-headquarters

[AdamG]

Adam G: I thought your idea a good one. But the scale and breadth of the Red Chinese effort is so huge, would the type of thing we did to the Russians work on them?

Pax Americana doesn't do offensive operations. :-/

I'd hazard that the biggest threat to the Chinese would be folks they've pissed off; their own dissidents within their walls, Anonymous and/or the more sophisticated Russian mob hackers. Then again, my opinion and $4 gets you a cup of gourmet coffee.

Glad the Kid posted that BBC hasslement. Also came back here to drop this load - Adam Taylor interviews a dissenting opinion.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mandi...stioned-2013-2

[carl]

Pax Americana doesn't do offensive operations. :-/

I'd hazard that the biggest threat to the Chinese would be folks they've pissed off; their own dissidents within their walls, Anonymous and/or the more sophisticated Russian mob hackers. Then again, my opinion and $4 gets you a cup of gourmet coffee.

Glad the Kid posted that BBC hasslement. Also came back here to drop this load - Adam Taylor interviews a dissenting opinion.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mandi...stioned-2013-2

Your first line made me laugh.

Do you think there is a possibility that some of the private companies in the US who are victimized by Red China (they are probably ticked off) will get tired of US gov inaction and do some monkey-wrenching on their own?

That article you linked to presents some classic arguments, in this case mixing the poor Red Chinese have been victimized by unknown bad men argument, with the you have to prove a negative before I'll believe it argument.

[AdamG]

Do you think there is a possibility that some of the private companies in the US who are victimized by Red China (they are probably ticked off) will get tired of US gov inaction and do some monkey-wrenching on their own?

Sounds like something Sy-Fy might option : the gruff-but-loveable head of a multinational that funds all sorts of do-gooder projects with some of their obscene profits takes it in the pants from those inscrutable perils of the East. His precious snowflake spawn are also scriptkiddies on the sly and they launch a devastating counterattack unbeknownst to daddy and his corporate security.
This of course triggers a PLA SPECOPS/Tong Gang kidnapping, with an epic fireball-filled conclusion.
The hackers can be played by some of those sparkly vampire types, but who takes the CEO's role? Bruce Willis?

Laugh now, but remember : Art imitates life. Life imitates art.

[Dayuhan]

would the type of thing we did to the Russians work on them?

That would depend on what you mean by "work". It won't stop them from spying, obviously. The Russians didn't stop spying either. It will make them take a lot more time and effort to assure that what they got isn't contaminated.

Do you think there is a possibility that some of the private companies in the US who are victimized by Red China (they are probably ticked off) will get tired of US gov inaction and do some monkey-wrenching on their own?

Do you really think the targets of the espionage, public and private, haven't been doing that all along? Why would you assume inaction?

[AdamG]

China’s “Great Firewall” blocks Web access to, among other things, Facebook and Twitter. People in China can get around the firewall, and very Web-savvy Chinese often do, by using something called VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks. But Chinese hackers already have access to what is presumably an extremely sophisticated VPN: the very servers they use for their foreign hacking.

This where the hackers may have gotten themselves into trouble. To be totally safe, a Chinese hacker would log out of the servers used for cyber-espionage (and allegedly sponsored by the Chinese military) before logging into a separate, more low-key VPN that he or she could use to access U.S.-based social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...washingtonpost

[carl]

Adam G:

This is a story attached to the article you cited that tells about how the ChiCom leadership habitually spies upon one another. They even hug each other at meetings so they can check for wires!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...n-one-another/

If they do that I imagine the PLA leaders do the same. With a bit of imagination that might be a good avenue for monkey-wrenching. Drop a hint on facebook or an internal email account here and there.

[Tukhachevskii]

Sounds like something Sy-Fy might option : the gruff-but-loveable head of a multinational that funds all sorts of do-gooder projects with some of their obscene profits takes it in the pants from those inscrutable perils of the East. His precious snowflake spawn are also scriptkiddies on the sly and they launch a devastating counterattack unbeknownst to daddy and his corporate security.
.

Sounds like Person of Interest!

[Dayuhan]

Interesting perspective:

http://www.voanews.com/content/china...t/1608419.html

[bourbon]

The Shanghai Army Unit That Hacked 115 U.S. Targets Likely Wasn't Even China's 'A-Team', by Andy Greenberg. Forbes.com, 2/21/2013.

But if APT1 is the most prolific team of hackers in the Chinese military, it’s not necessarily the best. In fact, when I spoke with Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer at Mandiant and a well-known author and blogger on network security, he argued that APT1 is actually a relatively sloppy group of hackers, and that its mistakes were what part of what allowed Mandiant to profile the unit in such detail. More than a dozen more elite groups of hackers likely operate within China’s military, says Bejtlich, groups that are both harder to track and harder to defend against.

I talked with Bejtlich about how APT1 measures up against other units in China’s military, how groups like it can be stopped, and about the “special forces” within China’s hacker corps that he says make APT1 look like amateurs. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Says the guys who did RSA SecurID hack were probably from more elite units.