When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612638/when-chinese-hackers-declared-war-on-the-rest-of-us/

by wolfgke • 8 years ago

61 33 8 years ago

lightbyte• 8 years ago

Back in 2015, though, GitHub was still an up-and-coming, independent company whose success came from making it considerably easier for other people to create computer software.

GitHub was an "up-and-coming" company just three years ago in 2015? They were founded in 2008 and immediately exploded in popularity. I can't take the rest of the article seriously after reading just three paragraphs.

thro_a_way• 8 years ago

I did take the article seriously. It was quite informative and entertaining. Very nice writing style.

bluntfang• 8 years ago

I would consider the audience not being engineers who use tools/services like github everyday. At the end of the day, github wasn't some huge public company with high market cap, and were recently bought by microsoft.

goobynight• 8 years ago

Up and coming doesn't mean small. It certainly saw significant growth from 2015-18. I don't think it's too egregious to write that, even if I wouldn't do it myself.

fouc• 8 years ago

"Us" vs "Them" is a cognitive bias. A title that attempts to exacerbate that bias isn't very nice.

uberman2• 8 years ago

Are you suggesting that "we" are using the "great cannon" to target "ourselves" then?

deogeo• 8 years ago

It's also a survival strategy - the counterpoint to 'divide and conquer'.

What happens to a group that doesn't unite or fight back because "Well we're not free of sin either"?

kylec• 8 years ago

If that’s how the people engaging in these attack see it, I would say the title is appropriate

Supermancho• 8 years ago

Take any given server. Log the IPs of invalid SSH attempts to access the machine over 3 months. Plot the IPs on a geolocation.

Chinese originating IPs are the overwhelming number.

I posted my actual data years ago as a response to some comment, but I could just grab my recent logs and nothing has changed much (frequency, outliers, and some volume trading).

While the phrasing may be obtuse, it's a sentiment reflecting reality.

auiya• 8 years ago

It would stand to reason. China has the largest number of endpoints, and thus is most likely to have the largest number of compromised hosts. I take it you've ruled out the possibility this is a geographically diverse spread of actors taking advantage of poor security practices on the large swaths of Chinese infrastructure in your logs?

monocasa• 8 years ago

China has large numbers of pirated unpatched systems meaning that botnets have large presences in China, regardless of who's running their command and control.

tomohawk• 8 years ago

Yet more evidence that shows the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in suppressing people's rights in order to enhance their own power.

bigmonads6• 8 years ago

The article misses the context of our generation, in which multiple Western and Eastern governments as an underlying trend have been exercising the same behaviors.

Australia officially banned strong encryption for state surveillance this week. The Unite States got caught in the world's most intrusive global and domestic surveillance effort and buried the news of this through its relationship with the domestic press. Poland repealed its supreme court after upending its government. Israel has been criticized for its domestic assassination program targeting thousands of people a year. The United States has a threat scoring system automatically scoring political, social, economic, and other "risk" data into municipal police departments so that these people can be monitored and managed without a warrant.

The fact of the matter is Western nations have been engaging on censorship, surveillance and "perception management" and "strategic communication" (read: propaganda) campaigns at home and around the world for decades.

Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the British in this article?

Overall, disappointed at the narrow view of the article. It can't offer solutions because its hasn't identified the problems.

hangonhn• 8 years ago

"Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the British in this article?"

Can you point us to some articles about this? I've never heard of this. It's fascinating!

bigmonads6• 8 years ago

Looking for them.

I got this from following reports and dialogues from American Think Tanks (primarily the Center for Strategic and International Studies). Essentially over the past decade there's been fairly regular dialogue between the British government and China regarding online, radio and publication public engagement.

There's been some British universities, thinktanks and others "accused" of helping China (e.g. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/westminster-and-kings-acc...) but from strategy side of the house (at least at CSIS, which is American) there hasn't been a lot of angst or fretting over it. I'll look for some specific CSIS reports.

ctoth• 8 years ago

New technique:

Spot articles mentioning China's bad behavior before they get comments.

- Write a comment about how the very top comments will be blatant whataboutism/otherwise pointing out that ... "other people do X too!"

- Encrypt and publish the comment.

- Wait.

- Publish the key.

- Look like a time traveler.

uberman2• 8 years ago

You seem to be suggesting that the Chinese should be excused for such attacks because the British somehow helped them establish a propaganda program or that that they should be excused because Poland dismissed it's supreme court.

Do you not believe that any state sponsored attack on a non-state entity is inappropriate, or only those conducted by "the West"?

jacobtwotwo2• 8 years ago

Can you explain how the op is suggesting that?

From my reading, it seems OP is saying that these types of articles need to include the broader context if they're to do any good in educating their readers on the issue at hand.

No context interpretation: 'China is the devil we need to stop!'

With context: 'China is one of the devils we need to stop!' (natural follow up: What is the common source of these devils?)

zhengyi13• 8 years ago

I don't think this is quite "whataboutism" (and no, that's not what you said, either), but if I were to speculate about your parent post's intent, it looks like they're suggesting that many more governments than the Chinese are doing this sort of thing, and any solution to this class of problem needs to take in the larger landscape.

bigmonads6• 8 years ago

No, I don't think this understands my comment.

richardw• 8 years ago

Every country uses their advantages, but I think you've painted a false equivalence here. Your comment won't get you a reduced Social Credit System score. Nobody's going to come knocking on your door. You can post critiques of Britain, US, EU etc but you'll still be unjailed and alive in the morning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

jacobtwotwo2• 8 years ago

I think the point is that China is exploiting the same system that other countries created and started exploiting prior, but it is doing so on a larger scale and to a more obvious degree than the others. That is to say, yes, it's a problem, but let's take a look at all the other instances of this type of behavior, so we can work toward a general solution, rather than just saying 'fuck china!'.

mAEStro-paNDa• 8 years ago

That system is a bit more complex than one would perceive.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social...

throwaway32r5y• 8 years ago

I wouldn’t be so sure about that,

One of the few things known about the Kill List is that it’s compiled in part by algorithm.
In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

bigmonads6• 8 years ago

It will. There's no false equivalence.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...

But to the broader point: my comment was about much more than social scoring systems.

vokep• 8 years ago

The United States has a threat scoring system automatically scoring political, social, economic, and other "risk" data into municipal police departments so that these people can be monitored and managed without a warrant.

This wouldn't be surprising if true, but do you have a source to verify this claim?

bigmonads6• 8 years ago

Here are some articles to get you started.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/1209...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-w...

National data from intelligence agencies are provided to municipal police through "fusion centers". Different cities provide their own data into these centers (e.g. Seattle recently built and tore down a city-wide camera surveillance system) which are consumed in the other direction. Threat scoring software use various data feeds including those from social media platforms.

ilovetux• 8 years ago

I agree, but at the bottom of the article it states that the article is an excerpt from a book about the great firewall. From this context, I can understand the scope of the article. An article centered around your statements here would be interesting to read.

walrus01• 8 years ago

A DDoS is not "hacking". I've personally seen DDoS much bigger than the one described in the article over things as trivial as League of Legends online gaming.

candiodari• 8 years ago

DDOSses (some of them) from China are indeed incredible. You trace them back, and they turn out to come from the central datacenters of China Telecom itself. Right out of the middle of their network core.

At first you think "IP spoofing". Every self-respecting DDOSer does it these days. And that's true. Then you start tracing the path of the traffic. Turns out the packets come straight from direct peering interface with China Telecom, in Hong Kong. The IPs WEREN'T spoofed (so luckily they suck at it, or at least some departments do).

Absolutely incredible. In my opinion this government maintains datacenters, at least 40-50 racks, JUST for ddosing sites they dislike on the internet.

Just imagine what the legal and PR disaster any western telco would face if they had maintained a datacenter dedicated to sabotaging others on the internet. Incredible.

It also makes it hard to decide what to do. Cut off China Telecom ? You get a choice: cut off all government (and academia) in China, or cut off everyone else (except "special economic zones"). That's pretty much it for mainland traffic.

Incredible.

squozzer• 8 years ago

GitHub and Tibetans like Lobsang Sither were among the first victims on a new front in China’s war on the internet, launched by a new breed of censor determined to go after the country’s enemies wherever they might be, using whatever means necessary.

I wonder if China's fentanyl factories aren't plugged into the internet...

When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us

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