Chinese Cyber (war)fare (merged thread)

[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.

[Dayuhan]

The extensive corruption in the PLA and throughout the Chinese leadership would also provide abundant opportunity for recruiting intelligence assets... along the lines of "tell us what we'd like to know, and maybe this dossier won't find it's way into the hands of assorted news outlets"... but of course it's reasonable to assume that this is being done as we speak, along with feeding defective information, reinforcing factional suspicions, and all of the other spy vs spy 101 stuff.