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Thread: Chinese Cyber (war)fare (merged thread)

  1. #41
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    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?
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  2. #42
    Council Member The Cuyahoga Kid's Avatar
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    Apparently Unit 61398 doesn't approve of the beeb

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

  3. #43
    Council Member AdamG's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    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
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  4. #44
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by AdamG View Post
    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.
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

  5. #45
    Council Member AdamG's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    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?

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  6. #46
    Council Member Dayuhan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    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?
    “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

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  7. #47
    Council Member AdamG's Avatar
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    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
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  8. #48
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    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.
    Last edited by carl; 02-21-2013 at 03:37 AM.
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  9. #49
    Council Member Dayuhan's Avatar
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    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.
    “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

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  10. #50
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    Quote Originally Posted by AdamG View Post
    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!

  11. #51
    Council Member Dayuhan's Avatar
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    “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

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  12. #52
    Council Member bourbon's Avatar
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    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.
    “[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson

  13. #53
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Here is an article from Foreign Policy that suggests that in order to deal with the Red Chinese cyber threat, we should consider unsheathing the sword in addition to more deftly wielding the shield.

    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...war_with_china

    It doesn't come up with anything particularly original but it is interesting because it is published by Foreign Policy, which appears to be an organ of inside the beltway conventional thinking. It is interesting because it is the first time I can remember reading that the genii inside the beltway might be at least cognizant of need to strike back.
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

  14. #54
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    This is a step in the right direction.

    http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013...cial-says?lite

    A national security adviser actually names Red China as the major cyber threat that it is. I figure that is a big thing for the bunnies inside the beltway, to actually state the obvious. Maybe something will come of it.
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

  15. #55
    Council Member AdamG's Avatar
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    When Tim Thomas weighs in, smart people read.

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...379430724.html

    The clearest sign of change came in a March 11 speech by Tom Donilon, President Obama's national security adviser, who condemned "cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale" and declared that "the international community cannot tolerate such activity from any country." Chinese cyber aggression poses risks "to international trade, to the reputation of Chinese industry and to our overall relations," Mr. Donilon said, and Beijing must stop it.

    "Why did we wait so long?" wonders Mr. Thomas as we sit in the U.S. Army's Foreign Military Studies Office, where the 64-year-old retired lieutenant colonel has studied Chinese cyber strategy for two decades. More than enough evidence accumulated long ago, he says, for the U.S. to say to Beijing and its denials of responsibility, "Folks, you don't have a leg to stand on, sorry."
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  16. #56
    Council Member davidbfpo's Avatar
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    Default US and China to set up cyber security working group

    Yes, a true headline from the BBC; clearly John Kerry has been reading and ignoring Carl's advice:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22137950
    davidbfpo

  17. #57
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
    Yes, a true headline from the BBC; clearly John Kerry has been reading and ignoring Carl's advice:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22137950
    I guess whatever change in policy Mr. Thomas (of the article AdamG presented) has discerned has been firmly reversed.

    One of the very interesting things Mr. Thomas said in that article was the ChiComs don't go after the Russkis. They go after Luxembourg and Singapore but not the Russkis. Luxembourg and Singapore probably take their lead from us when they are attacked. The Russkis of course tell us to go pound sand. I suspect the reason the Red Chinese don't go after the Russ is because if they do, they know the Russ will go after them; unlike us they won't wring their hands and quietly hyperventilate.

    David: I started laughing when I read what you posted above. It was the kind of laugh a character in a movie laughs when he asks another character "You gave them our guns?!" and that second character replies "Yea. They said they wouldn't hurt us. I looked into their eyes and I believed them." Oh no, I am starting to laugh again.

    To use another WWII analogy, the story you cited is like reading that Churchill had directed Fighter Command to work closely with the Luftwaffe in order to figure out how to solve the problem of the Blitz.

    You know the most incredible fiction is coming to life. In the original Battlestar Galactica, an oh so well educated and refined character gave the keys to the Cylons and they killed everybody, except the doughty crew of the Galactica. The writers probably wrote it that way thinking it was too improbable ever to be true. Unknowing prophets they were.

    Future historians will devote many volumes (or electrons...no, volumes, they won't trust computers in the future) in trying to explain how a fundamentally sensible and practical people like the Americans, allowed themselves to be directed by such a feckless, foolish, arrogant and cowardly group as are our inside the beltway elites.
    Last edited by carl; 04-15-2013 at 03:49 AM.
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

  18. #58
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Something Mr. Thomas said in his article got me to thinking. He said a particular Red Chinese target is the company that supplies most of the nat gas and petroleum pipeline remote control software in North American. Now, we ran all kinds of complicated pipeline systems just fine for decades before computers came along. So I have two questions for those of you who know a lot about such things.

    First, would the pipeline infrastructure of the 1950s be vulnerable to a cyber attack from Red China or anywhere else? I am guessing it would not be.

    Second, do you think we might someday go back to such manual system with land line communications in order to be more secure from lethal cyber attack? I know I am probably getting something wrong but the general thrust of the question is about whether older tech might be better in the long run.
    Last edited by carl; 04-15-2013 at 03:50 AM.
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

  19. #59
    Council Member bourbon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    First, would the pipeline infrastructure of the 1950s be vulnerable to a cyber attack from Red China or anywhere else? I am guessing it would not be.
    Maybe, I don’t know – doesn’t really matter. Pipelines are only useful if you have something to actually pump through it – they are dependent on other processes in the supply/value chain. Take natural gas as an example – if the processing plant is disrupted, you would have no product to pump through the gas pipeline.
    “[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson

  20. #60
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    The real point of my question is should we go back to the level of control tech that existed in the 50s or 60s? Are we so vulnerable now that that would be worth the cost? Would a cyber disaster prompt that kind of move?
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

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