Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- the volume of attack coming from Chinese IP addresses but are essentially non-Chinese in origin is substantial. The windows xp piracy rate ends up in a very low uptake of windows update, leaving quite possibly the largest population of vulnerable hosts in the world. Attacks end up being false-flag even if not intended
- Attacks that are genuinely Chinese in origin tend towards being citizen initiatives. Imagine if you lived in a jurisdiction where instead of being treated like Garry McKinnon for attacking American infrastructure, just nobody gives a fuck. The reverse also applies, but has a limit that Chinese is not widely understood by American 'hackers'. Any Chinese skiddie can cause an international incident by trying out their tools on an American company. Universities that run courses in infosec, of which some are military, are commonly accused origin IPs for attacks. The likelihood is that complacence, rather than official sponsorship or policy is the prime driver behind this phenomenon.
- Instead of trying to build out \cough\\ cybercommands, Government sponsored CTF tournaments identify and reward talent, without bringing it on-board the National Security apparatus. Talent is left out in the community on the understanding it can be found if needed.
- The 'Chinese Government' is nowhere near as cohesive and controlling as is depicted in Western sources. Government sponsored economic espionage activities that are out of proportion to American efforts against the rest of the world will originate at the provincial level. Chinese industry is very regional, with whole provinces specializing in specific industries, hence the benefits of economic espionage is highly regional in nature too. It is not in the central government's interests to sustain the Chinese hacker folklore, nor would it be within their ability to rein in any provincial government involvement.
Edit: From the report in the article
"Our research and observations indicate that the Communist Party of China (CPC,中国共产党) is tasking the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA,中国人民解放军) to commit systematic cyber espionage and data theft against organizations around the world "
They have a whole section devoted to backing this up.
Most nations have something like this these days (eg. Australia, France, Germany, Korea, UK, US.)
The US military terms this move toward constant low-level conflict with a focus on information warfare the RMA or Revolution in Military Affairs.
Also note that quoting five words of mandarin (五个汉字) may function may make a commercially produced report appear more authoritative, but in practice it probably demonstrates the opposite.
Are you asserting that these nations have broken into non military infrastructure of some other nation they are at peace with?
You are also asserting that these countries are stealing corporate data.
Can you back that up? Do they compare with what China is doing?
> Also note that quoting five words of mandarin (五个汉字) may function may make a commercially produced report appear more authoritative, but in practice it probably demonstrates the opposite.
That doesn't hold for everyone. I agree with you that, in general, Mandarin is sort of fad-ish.
Certainly, they do it all the time. It's considered par for the course these days. It's not always breaking in to the infrastructure, sometimes it's providing it.
For just two well known examples, look at Israel's Mossad-affiliated AMDOCS company's widespread global telecommunications data theft with "hosted billing solutions" for major mobile and fixed-line telecommunications carriers worldwide (certainly US and EU-wide).
Or, look at the European Union's exposure of how the US has been constantly abusing surveillance capabilities for global geostrategic business purposes in their original report on Echelon; IIRC they had a very well documented case of Airbus vs. Boeing.
These things don't stand still, and the above examples are continuing but originated 10+ years ago.
IMHO it is now ignorant to believe that we live in anything less than a world of constant conflict where corporate-government mutual assistance and backscratching are the order of the day and citizens rights are nothing more than a quaint, antiquated notion you can easily put down in court given enough lawyers, legal entities, deniability, media gag orders (UK tops the world for these), assassinations (Singapore is up there), imprisonment (US after Wikileaks) or the odd, extreme, resignation.
1. Attacking critical civilian infrastructure 2. Outright corporate theft
Once again, any reputable reports will be appreciated. (For any crazy statement X, one can always find a forum or website backing X. Thats why the insistence on reputable sources.)
(Edit 1: Changed link from Cryptome's still-hosted draft-form to the final-form report.) (Edit 2: Added section reference.)
Tell me which clause leads you to believe ECHELON actively breaks into corporate networks. It seems that what ECHELON has access to is something that anybody can lay their hands on. If you conduct your business by broadcasting messages over a public, then not only ECHELON, but the whole world can listen to it. This is much different than the ugly spearfishing and active breaking in by the Chinese.
Did you just keyword search and paste without understanding what the clauses meant?
"10.6. Is ECHELON suitable for industrial espionage suitable for industrial espionage?
The strategic monitoring of international telecommunications, can produce useful information for industrial espionage purposes, but only by chance. In fact, sensitive industrial information is primarily to be found in the firms themselves, which means that industrial espionage is carried out primarily by attempting to obtain the information via employees or infiltrators or by breaking into internal computer networks. Only where sensitive data is sent outside via cable or radio (satellite) can a communications surveillance system be used for industrial espionage. This occurs systematically in the following three cases:
- in connection with firms which operate in three times zones, so that interim results are sent from Europe to America and then on to Asia; - in the case of videoconferences in multinational companies conducted by VSAT or cable;
- when important contracts have to be negotiated locally (construction of facilities, telecommunications infrastructure, rebuilding of transport systems, etc.), and the firm's representatives have to consult their head office.
If firms fail to protect their communications in such cases, interception can provide competitors with valuable data"
Look, I am trying to point out the bigger picture here, internationally, and developments over the last couple of decades. I provided you with one of the key open sources that provided a public touchstone for those who were aware of the abuses over a decade ago. Understanding that document should put the fear in to most people. I am forced to question whether you have read the document, but reading your comments such as It seems that what ECHELON has access to is something that anybody can lay their hands on and I have pasted the whole section here it is clear that you have not. Put some effort in, educate yourself, then come back and have a discussion.
Tell me which clause leads you to believe ECHELON actively breaks into corporate networks.
Now you are putting words in to my mouth. I brought up Echelon as one part of the information warfare arsenal deployed by non-Chinese state actors for commercial espionage purposes, which was the original scope of discussion.
If you conduct your business by broadcasting messages over a public, then not only ECHELON, but the whole world can listen to it.
Oh right. "Everyone else deserves what they get", what a civic perspective! Show me how widespread encryption was in the mid '90s when the world was just getting on the internet. Now show me how widespread that was for VSAT systems and long-haul ISDN being shot out to NSA satellites over long-haul microwave links. I personally worked on video conferencing and surveillance systems in that era for multiple governments and I can tell you that as far as any deployed system I witnessed across five or so countries went, nobody used passwords, ever - to say nothing of encryption!
This is much different than the ugly spearfishing and active breaking in by the Chinese.
Believing there is no targeting capability within Echelon and similar systems is a huge and IMHO poorly supported assumption. Remember, that document is 10+ years old, discussing information on the state of the art ~15 years ago. Further, after Stuxnet and other revelations, believing the west does not develop offensive information warfare capabilities is laughable. Some of us knew this 10+ years ago. They were a lot less careful at hiding their tracks back then (eg. frequent use of IPs within reasonably.specific.descriptor.mil.somecountry reverse DNS to browse the web).
Did you just keyword search and paste without understanding what the clauses meant?
No, I read that document when it first came out, in fact I was reading about Echelon before it was published, and being labelled a nut-job. Since then I have occasionally glanced at it, usually to provide a reference to unbelievers. It's very rare that someone reads it and continues to argue.
While we're at it of a morning, here's some more information on how normal this stuff is. It is pretty well established that the Chinese routinely supply entire mobile telephony systems to developing nations (in Africa, etc.) in order to - on the face of it - sweeten resource extraction deals, but it is widely assumed to maintain a technical capacity for signals intelligence through that infrastructure (Huawei, etc.).
Are they alone? Consider this: while physically on the ground for a month during the Tunisian revolution, the first of the Arab spring, I found that Vodafone offered the fastest 3G I'd ever experienced - anywhere in the world. I even had Facebook and Gmail access. To assume that communications capability was not a targetable intelligence asset for the west in some measure seems ... highly unlikely to me.
More to the point, Applebaum of the Tor project also visited Tunisia later on as a precursor to his being in touch with people in other Arab Spring nations. Many (most? all?) of the revolutions uncovered vast, turnkey, state-level mass surveillance and censorship tools -- supplied to these regimes by individual companies in the west. Wikileaks then subsequently provided a large release around this: Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries. http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/
Now; where do you think the know-how to provide states with that sort of infrastructure comes from? Just the commercial world? Or people who have left the government fold to go commercial? I think you'll find they support each other.
In closing, we as technologists have a responsibility to maintain an ethical outlook on our field. Our field is a global one by definition, and therefore above nationalism. Given this context, we can either choose to contribute to paths that effect the betterment of the world through increased human rights, or to the whittling-away of individual rights to privacy, free speech and self-determination for the profit of the few. One path is easier, requires less thinking, less self-education, and offers more pay. The other is a greater challenge. In so far as I am aware, of those I personally respect, real hackers prefer a challenge. Your path is your own. Choose it wisely.
Economic espionage by state agents is not new, and NSA is not innocent here. I might even dare to say its common practice when dealing with large airplane or car manufacturers.
I'm not sure people understand how huge of a deal that is to a) accuse and b) be guilty of.
Edit: Here is the conclusion of the report:
In a State that rigorously monitors Internet use, it is highly unlikely that the Chinese Government is unaware of an attack group that operates from the Pudong New Area of Shanghai.
This is likely false and demonstrating the authors do not understand what the Chinese government is monitoring. The Chinese government monitors Internet speech and content. It doesn't care about how many viruses or hackers are there.
The Chinese military is an appendage of the Chinese government, and acts according to the government's demands. As with StuxNet, it's highly likely that these attacks had officials calling the shots (if not writing the code).
This is counter to the public position of the Chinese government, which is that they consider cyber attacks to be crimes that they aggressively pursue and prevent.
It's also a meaningless distinction, as most viruses and cyber attacks originating from Chinese IP space use content as a vector.
People absolutely freak out when they suspect the US government of spying on a citizen. But chinese hackers, state sponsored or not, seem to be able to roam with impunity. Several US companies have had their ip stolen and their businesses ruined. Companies have lost as much as a billion dollars in ip in a single night. [1] There are so many of them with such diversity of skills that almost no one is safe.
I'm not trying to rattle sabers here, just pointing out that the world is facing a threat to privacy and secrecy that is greater than we have ever known. Chinese hackers have more power than the CIA, KGB and Gestapo combined, and nothing short of WWIII can slow them down.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-o...
I'd argue that a government spying on its own citizens is a much greater threat. If a Chinese hacker steals your identity, maybe you're out some (possibly significant) amount of money, and a lot of hassle. Your physical well-being is typically not threatened.
If, however, the government reads through your email, listens in to your Skype calls, and then decides that you've committed some crime (and by virtue of living day-to-day in our hyper-criminalized society, almost all of us are guilty of some crime these days), you can be harrassed physically, legally, and financially for what might be the rest of your life by our crushing-revenge-driven legal system--you might even be imprisoned.
Chinese hackers can't imprison you, or sue you until you choose to exit early. So from a regular person's perspective, we should be way more worried about what's going on at home.
I guess the Chinese should know a thing or two about failing to keep ownership of "intellectual property" and the dangers associated on relying only on IP alone. I took this from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Roman_Empire:
> Byzantine historian Procopius stated that two Christian monks eventually uncovered the way of how silk was made. From this revelation spies were sent to steal the silkworm eggs, resulting in silk production in the Mediterranean.[18]
Additionally, the US turned a blind eye to its own theft of Europe's IP in the 1800s and early 1900s as we were developing.
Not that we shouldn't defend against it when used against us, but it seems par for the course for developing nations to catch up this way.
In corporate America, the average employee is not sophisticated enough to resist spearfishing, which is how the vast majority of Chinese intrusions begin. But if the IT dept puts in place technologies or restrictions to protect against spearfishing (like quarantined browsers or blocking attachments), the average employees complain bitterly about the impact on their habits. And they don't like training. When management sides with employees, well-known security holes are left open.
Even upgrading operating systems, which is one of the most effective tools against intrusions, is met with fear and anger at many organizations.
Even without those front-line defenses, it is possible to find, stop, and eject the Chinese from corporate networks...but it is extremely time consuming and expensive to do so. Although they would never admit it, it's likely that many corporations make the calculation of "how much" intrusion they are willing to fight, and tacitly permit the rest. What they really want is not to stop the Chinese "at all costs", but to stop the Chinese for a given cost.
I bet they're constantly having laughs at our expense. They must think of the US as a bunch of flubby overrated dimwits.
I don't believe any cyber attack is likely to be that dramatic or destructive for the same reasons that computer systems are hard to protect. Complexity. It's hard to protect a computer system because there are so many potential vulnerabilities. It's easier to take one down, but that won't necessarily result in much damage. To do that you need to take over a complex system and exercise sophisticated and dynamic control of it, to orchestrate very specific behaviour, which is not easy. For example shutting down the computers at a nuclear power plant may be feasible. However taking control of it and manipulating it with enough sophistication to engineer a meltdown, while overcoming all the computerised and physical safeguards would be a lot more complex to pull off.
The Pearl Harbour attack was an attempt by a government to cripple an enemy's capability to project power in the Pacific ocean, with the attacker's intent to then establish dominance in that region. What you describe was nothing of the sort and to call it another Pearl Harbour is simply wrong.
Comparing this to 9/11 is like comparing a tank to a soap box racer. I might as well say that the price of pork belly futures is the next Pearl Harbour as that also affects US policy.
Did post-9/11 have the same economic effects for the US as the post-WWII era? No, but that's not really the effect of any particular difference between the events that precipitated WWII and the wars of the last decade. And, if anything, the post-9/11 landscape HAS seen a dramatic shift in the global balance of power, specifically in challenges to US supremacy and an internal reconsideration of how we project the power we do have.
The point to be made here, which I think backs up the whole "digital attack as next Pearl Harbor" argument, is that unconventional warfare is the new conventional warfare. We're less likely to see a direct military challenge along the lines of Pearl Harbor, and much more likely to see indirect challenges to US supremacy through digital or terrorist attacks. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn here, and you made many of them yourself.
The US was not forced into those wars. Iraq posed no threat to the US. Afghanistan posed no threat to the US. Pearl Harbour was an act of war by a nation; Japan had serious intent to dominate the Pacific and become the regional economic and military power, and was prepared to do serious damage to the US in order to achieve those aims. 9/11 was an act of terrorism by non-national actors. Iraq and Afghanistan were no threat; the US was not pushed into those wars. The US chose them.
"Pearl Harbor may have forced our hand more clearly, so to speak, but both attacks were deep provocations."
What exactly was 9/11 a provocation to do? Most of the people involved were already dead, and they weren't state actors - they were private citizens. What exactly was that a provocation for the US to do?
"each represented a physical challenge to the United States' influence over particular spheres."
One represented a challenge to physically and economically dominate the Pacific for the foreseeable future. One represented a challenge to the structural integrity of some buildings in New York. The scale, effect and consequences are so fantastically different that I genuinely struggle to understand how they can be seen in principle as the same thing.
"But if you want to define "Pearl Harbors" as serious, potentially dangerous attacks against the US"
By this definition, 9/11, which was not a serious, potentially dangerous attack against the US, was not a Pearl Harbour. It was a criminal act that killed a lot of people and caused a lot of damage. It was not a serious threat to the US.
In addition my perception from outside of the US is, that since 9/11 US popular culture uses terrorists as villains in a similar manner as Nazis or Russian spies before that. (Atop of that, I have a hard time remembering a movie in which the torture of an SS member is depicted as a necessary evil.)
So I am not arguing that the twelve years 9/11 did change the world in a similar magnitude as WWII did, I am arguing that the cultural significance of 9/11 is similar to the cultural significance of Pearl Harbour. Especially considering that the US would have been drawn into WWII anyhow, while at least the Afghanistan war is a direct consequence of 9/11.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#Classification_i....
I disagree. The US was not pushed into those wars; the US chose both those wars. Neither of those nations presented a threat to the US, and Iraq had no links to 9/11 (and Afghanistan's links were laughably circumstantial - some of the planners lived there; let's have a war!) - it was simply a convenient excuse for the US to launch into a badly thought-out war.
I think the rest of my point in the second paragraph stands though.
If you don't want to use it, just turn it off. I'd love to see how the Chinese/Russian hackers can hack such a machine, unless they have physical access to them.
Also, how can you be sure that Ubuntu is secure? It seems to me that there is a general problem with all *NIX systems with regards of how they (mis)manage permissions (either file permissions or OS permissions), and I'm very sad that not even the newly-developed OSes (Android) have not fixed that!
User, group, other and read, write execute has been around for decades. You won't find a simpler, more understandable system for file permissions. There are many more complex systems added on top of this, but the basics are simple and easy to manage.
To which I answer, air gap.
Yes, the air gap can be compromised, but at that point you aren't just talking hackers in China. You're talking organized crime with cat burglars breaking into US facilities.
Another method is Social Engineering.
I'm much more worried about nuclear weapons, Authoritarianism, and biological warfare.
Seriously, who actually experiences fear because of chinese hackers?
Just because people in both countries can now face a new angle of attack doesn't mean that there is something to not be spooked about. People in both countries should be equally spooked.
The USA has more to lose in this battle - for a nation moving away from manufacturing and aiming to keep a tech lead for its economy - China's actions eventually would mean check mate.
Authoritarianism is more worrying if it's in the country I'm standing on.
My main fear with biological warfare is non-state actors. As it becomes possible to do more with less, the chances of fundamentalists and other malicious parties using biological agents for terrorism or worse go up.
IIRC one of the main reasons MAD was a threat to the Russians was because they're populated centres are mostly in one area of the country.
Its all saber rattling regardless I guess, as china develops they'll be more so concentrated in cities like everyone else.
Who made the statement?
And hence that strategy works to prevent that attack, not defeat it...
Have a bunch of relatively large (much larger that the US's) warheads strike American cities exclusively. Forget about military targets.
This deterrent is ineffective against the United States. The medium-range missiles cannot even hit Seattle, much less Miami. The entire Chinese ICBM force consists of 20 missiles with non-MIRVed 5-megaton thermonuclear warheads.
Thus, in terms of nuclear weaponry, the United States outguns China by about 2000-to-20. This is why their plans assume defeat in a nuclear exchange -- because it is a virtual certainty.
You are correct on the number. But the part about the Soviet Union, Im not so sure...
> History
Mao Zedong decided to begin a Chinese nuclear-weapons program during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-1955 over the Quemoy and Matsu Islands. While he did not expect to be able to match the large American nuclear arsenal, Mao believed that even a few bombs would increase China's diplomatic credibility. Construction of uranium enrichment plants in Baotou and Lanzhou began in 1958, and a plutonium facility in Jiuquan and the Lop Nur nuclear test site by 1960. The Soviet Union provided assistance in the early Chinese program by sending advisers to help in the facilities devoted to fissile material production, and promised to provide a prototype bomb.[12] In July 1960, however, during the Sino-Soviet split, all Soviet assistance with the Chinese nuclear program was abruptly terminated and all Soviet technicians were withdrawn from the program.[13]
By 1964, when the first Chinese atomic bomb was tested, China was barely on speaking terms with the Soviet Union. By 1969, China and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war. The Soviets tripled their forces in the Far East during the 1960s, deploying fully one-quarter of the Soviet military along the Chinese border. (They did this without drawing down their forces in Europe, which placed quite a strain on the Soviet economy.)
After Nixon visited China in 1972, Henry Kissinger even gave security briefings to Chinese generals, supplying them with satellite imagery and the location of Soviet forces.
I just thinking the other day, once home-made drones become capable enough of carrying loads of up to 5kg then what would stop such a potential malicious "non-state actor" of using such a drone fully-loaded with chemical nasty stuff to bypass all the obsolete ground-security system at a big open-air event (say, the Super-Bowl or any other sports event attended by 70,000+ people) and cause harm to most of all those present?
Why would they only spy on citizens? They have a long history of sharing corporate espionage when corporate data is snatched in their net (http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/19/114807.sht... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy). Economic espionage by governments began way before internet even was a thing.
Not that this makes it right for china to use hackers for the same goal, but at the same time it is nothing new. The biggest difference between NSA and the Chinese hackers are that the NSA are mostly passive listeners on the wire, passing along what they "hear" to corporations. Chinese hackers are more active listeners, and pass along what they "find" to corporations. Still, not much of a difference in my book.
A bit over the top? You really aren't suggesting a start to WWIII over a couple of nytimes articles right?
The motivator is the election vendors are pushing for a per-registered-voter fee business model. Election integrity be damned.
Ref: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/anonymous-hackers-c...
I think the western military-industrial and government security industry wants to daemonize China as justification for spending. Realistically, at the global geostrategic level, China is already beating them at their own game, ie. pure capitalism behind a facade of diplomacy and social concern.
Personally I would posit that the major area of conflict right now between China and the US is probably Burma, not some random server providing a pitifully limited window in to the vast bureaucratic engines of US governance.
US defense spending was 4.7% of GDP in 2011. What do you call the other 95.3%?
(context: Russia 3.9%, China 2.0%, World 2.5%) --SIPRI
In 2011 defense spending was 20% of the budget, and in real terms the US spent more than the next 13 highest spending nations combined (China, Russia, UK, France, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, to name a few). [0]
[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/e...
> It's a lot more useful to compare defense spending to the budget, not GDP
Different types of government will lead to the same expenditures being handled within the government's budget and not. US budget/GDP is low, so using that ratio instead makes it look misleadingly high (since you get to 4x it).
budget/GDP ratio examples: Cuba 86.5%, France 55.7%, UK 50.9%, US 23.6%, China 23.0%, India 17.5%
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
> US spent more than the next 13 highest spending nations combined
If you're comparing how countries allocate their resources, you divide their absolute numbers by the amount of resources they have (debt-to-GDP, etc).
By example: the US produced 46,500,000 tonnes of salt in 2006, and France 7,000,000 tonnes. US salt epidemic! But that salt production ratio is 6.64, and their 2006 GDP ratio is 5.837.
edit: if you like 80s-90s US/NATO/world military expenditure comparisons, this is comprehensive: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/bwcfcompsummary%5B1%5D...
I put in $E amount of effort to produce a product priced at $X (let us say a software product). Somebody steals the source code I use to produce the product and sells the same product at $X-E killing my business. How is this justified in any sense?
Yes, there have been cases of Chinese hackers stealing source code.
Aargh. That does not make it moral or legal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p7FqSav6Ho
edit: One quick conclusion. it looks like their teams are segmented - you have the guys like Doda who are doing the grunt work of sending out the emails and extracting information. These guys get discovered. Who isn't being discovered are the tools and exploit writers, a much more interesting target to uncover. Doda doesn't seem to be a terribly sophisticated hacker, he looks like an ordinary computer user that has been trained to use the tools.
Using emails with sequential ID's in them and opening your own computer up to being owned suggests further that he isn't very sophisticated.
"Mandiant discovered that two sets of I.P. addresses used in the attacks were registered in the same neighborhood as Unit 61398’s building.
“It’s where more than 90 percent of the attacks we followed come from,” said Mr. Mandia.
The only other possibility, the report concludes with a touch of sarcasm, is that “a secret, resourced organization full of mainland Chinese speakers with direct access to Shanghai-based telecommunications infrastructure is engaged in a multiyear enterprise-scale computer espionage campaign right outside of Unit 61398’s gates.”"
No big leap, Pudong only has 5 million inhabitants, roughly the size of the Washington DC Metro area.
Amazing.
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/31/washington-moves...
It's CNA (e.g. operations designed specifically to disrupt or destroy civilian or military targets) which is "on the table" for act-of-war status, particularly if there is kinetic effect. An example would be if something like Stuxnet were deployed against the U.S. power grid.
The idea is that it doesn't matter whether a power plant was disabled via a bomb or a backdoor. Both the intent and the outcome are the same. So the declaration of policy you linked to is really a clarification rather than a "change of course".
The lines are blurry when it comes to CNE and critical infrastructure. The problem you have is that if, say, 3 competing agencies are all vying for control of the same powerplant for CNE reasons (e.g. not trying to cause damage), the plant might nonetheless get taken out by accident. I'm not sure anyone is clear on what to do in that kind of a situation.
[1] We can divide "cyber" operations into the following categories (straight from wikipedia):
* Computer Network Attack (CNA): Includes actions taken via computer networks to disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy the information within computers and computer networks and/or the computers/networks themselves.
* Computer Network Defense (CND): Includes actions taken via computer networks to protect, monitor, analyze, detect and respond to network attacks, intrusions, disruptions or other unauthorized actions that would compromise or cripple defense information systems and networks. Joint Pub 6.0 further outlines Computer Network Defense as an aspect of NetOps
* Computer Network Exploitation (CNE): Includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enemy information systems or networks.
Same applies to lower level stuff. If there is say a hypothetical an irrational policy for mandatory arrest of anyone suspected of terrorism, one shouldn't be surprised that neighbors will start reporting each other over the color of fence or wrong type of shutters installed.
I guess they couldn't just say "you hack us, we hack you back". Or more realistically: "We hack you first in secret. Then you hack us back in secret. And then we have an excuse to go public to get the public's support to hack you back, and get more funding and bills passed for whatever other secret operations we want to do next". Case in point: Iran.
You probably couldn't do something like this but it's interesting to think about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
It is also naive to assume that there is a G8 nation without a cyber warfare unit in the Army. Or to assume that other nations don't do covert operations.
FUD has finally arrived in the mainstream.
The news on Chinese cyber attacks to the US can help give a boost in public support to these laws, giving them valid reasoning to give away our online privacy.
50 cent army? :-)
I hope you have no dirty laundry in your e-mail accounts, the Chinese military is probably reading them right now.
Lit it or not, what the Chinese are doing is pretty smart, let' face it. Countries launch (ed) wars to get what they want, the Chinese get it the easy way.