chinese-hacking « WordPress.com Tag Feed

China, hacking, fact, opinion

Ted Summerfield aka punzhu puzzles — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:31:38 +0000

Lately there has been an upsurge of media reports concerning hacking said to be originating in China

Hack Attack: China and the U.S. Trade Barbs on Cyberwarfare

Hannah Beech — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:51:05 +0000

The gloves are off. For years, the White House has danced around the sensitive topic of Chinese hack

Cyber-attackers penetrate Reserve Bank networks

aurelius77 — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:00:31 +0000

The Reserve Bank of Australia’s computer networks have been repeatedly and successfully hacked in a

Why Hacktivists Are Wrongly Top Targets for Politicians Instead of Chinese Hacking of U.S Systems

Cynthia Yildirim — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:29:29 +0000

“The White House warned today of the threat posed by WikiLeaks, LulzSec, and other “hacktivist” groups that have the ability to target U.S. companies and expropriate confidential data.”*

Why aren’t hackers in China being as actively pursued as hacktivists and people connected to Wikileaks? Well, who is exposing the unethical interests and corruption of politicians? Cenk Uygur explains who politicians are choosing to protect.

What the Fuck is Hack?, Oops, Chinese Hack?

elcidharth — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:18:27 +0000

Hacker (computer security)

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Computer hacking
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In the computer security context, a hacker is someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, or challenge.^[1] The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground and is now a known community.^[2] While other uses of the word hacker exist that are not related to computer security, such as referring to someone with an advanced understanding of computers and computer networks,^[3] they are rarely used in mainstream context.^{[citation needed]} They are subject to the long standing hacker definition controversy about the true meaning of the term hacker. In this controversy, the term hacker is reclaimed by computer programmers who argue that someone breaking into computers is better called a cracker,^[4] not making a difference between computer criminals (black hats) and computer security experts (white hats).^[5] Some white hat hackers claim that they also deserve the title hacker, and that only black hats should be called crackers.

History

Further information: Timeline of computer security hacker history

Bruce Sterling traces part of the roots of the computer underground to the Yippies, a 1960s counterculture movement which published the Technological Assistance Program (TAP) newsletter.^{[citation needed]} TAP was a phone phreaking newsletter that taught the techniques necessary for the unauthorized exploration of the phone network. Many people from the phreaking community are also active in the hacking community even today, and vice versa.^{[citation needed]}

Classifications

Several subgroups of the computer underground with different attitudes use different terms to demarcate themselves from each other, or try to exclude some specific group with which they do not agree. Eric S. Raymond (author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary) advocates that members of the computer underground should be called crackers. Yet, those people see themselves as hackers and even try to include the views of Raymond in what they see as one wider hacker culture, a view harshly rejected by Raymond himself. Instead of a hacker/cracker dichotomy, they give more emphasis to a spectrum of different categories, such as white hat, grey hat, black hat and script kiddie. In contrast to Raymond, they usually reserve the term cracker for more malicious activity. According to (Clifford R.D. 2006) a cracker or cracking is to “gain unauthorized access to a computer in order to commit another crime such as destroying information contained in that system”.^[6] These subgroups may also be defined by the legal status of their activities.^[7]

White hat

A white hat hacker breaks security for non-malicious reasons, perhaps to test their own security system or while working for a security company which makes security software. The term “white hat” in Internet slang refers to an ethical hacker. This classification also includes individuals who perform penetration tests and vulnerability assessments within a contractual agreement. The EC-Council,^[8] also known as the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants, is one of those organisations that have developed certifications, courseware, classes, and online training covering the diverse arena of Ethical Hacking.^[7]

Black hat

A “black hat” hacker is a hacker who “violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain” (Moore, 2005).^[9] Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are “the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal”.^[10] Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy data or make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network. They choose their targets using a two-pronged process known as the “pre-hacking stage”.

Part 1: Targeting

The hacker determines what network to break into during this phase. The target may be of particular interest to the hacker, either politically or personally, or it may be picked at random. Next, they will port scan a network to determine if it is vulnerable to attacks, which is just testing all ports on a host machine for a response. Open ports—those that do respond—will allow a hacker to access the system.

Part 2: Research and Information Gathering

It is in this stage that the hacker will visit or contact the target in some way in hopes of finding out vital information that will help them access the system. The main way that hackers get desired results from this stage is from “social engineering”, which will be explained below. Aside from social engineering, hackers can also use a technique called “dumpster diving”. Dumpster diving is when a hacker will literally search through users’ garbage in hopes of finding documents that have been thrown away, which may contain information a hacker can use directly or indirectly, to help them gain access to a network.

Part 3: Finishing The Attack

This is the stage when the hacker will invade the primary target that he/she was planning to attack or steal from. Many “hackers” will be caught after this point, lured in or grabbed by any data also known as a honeypot (a trap set up by computer security personnel).

Grey hat

Main article: Grey hat

A grey hat hacker is a combination of a Black Hat and a White Hat Hacker. A Grey Hat Hacker may surf the internet and hack into a computer system for the sole purpose of notifying the administrator that their system has been hacked, for example. Then they may offer to repair their system for a small fee.^[10]

Elite hacker

A social status among hackers, elite is used to describe the most skilled. Newly discovered exploits will circulate among these hackers. Elite groups such as Masters of Deception conferred a kind of credibility on their members.^[11]

Script kiddie

A script kiddie (or skiddie) is a non-expert who breaks into computer systems by using pre-packaged automated tools written by others, usually with little understanding of the underlying concept—hence the term script (i.e. a prearranged plan or set of activities) kiddie (i.e. kid, child—an individual lacking knowledge and experience, immature).^[12]

Neophyte

A neophyte, “n00b“, or “newbie” is someone who is new to hacking or phreaking and has almost no knowledge or experience of the workings of technology, and hacking.^[10]

Blue hat

A blue hat hacker is someone outside computer security consulting firms who is used to bug test a system prior to its launch, looking for exploits so they can be closed. Microsoft also uses the term BlueHat to represent a series of security briefing events.^[13]^[14]^[15]

Hacktivist

A hacktivist is a hacker who utilizes technology to announce a social, ideological, religious, or political message. In general, most hacktivism involves website defacement or denial-of-service attacks.

Nation state

Intelligence agencies and cyberwarfare operatives of nation states.^[16]

Organized criminal gangs

Criminal activity carried on for profit.^[16]

Bots

Bots are automated software tools, some freeware, that are available for the use of any type of hacker.^[16]

Attacks

Main article: Computer insecurity

Computer security
Secure operating systems Security by design Secure coding
Computer insecurity
Vulnerability Eavesdropping Exploits Trojans Viruses and worms Denial of service Payloads Rootkits Keyloggers
v t e

A typical approach in an attack on Internet-connected system is:

Network enumeration: Discovering information about the intended target.
Vulnerability analysis: Identifying potential ways of attack.
Exploitation: Attempting to compromise the system by employing the vulnerabilities found through the vulnerability analysis.^[17]

In order to do so, there are several recurring tools of the trade and techniques used by computer criminals and security experts.

Security exploits

Main article: Exploit (computer security)

A security exploit is a prepared application that takes advantage of a known weakness. Common examples of security exploits are SQL injection, Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery which abuse security holes that may result from substandard programming practice. Other exploits would be able to be used through FTP, HTTP, PHP, SSH, Telnet and some web-pages. These are very common in website/domain hacking.

Techniques

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2011)

Vulnerability scanner

Main article: Vulnerability scanner

A vulnerability scanner is a tool used to quickly check computers on a network for known weaknesses. Hackers also commonly use port scanners. These check to see which ports on a specified computer are “open” or available to access the computer, and sometimes will detect what program or service is listening on that port, and its version number. (Note that firewalls defend computers from intruders by limiting access to ports/machines both inbound and outbound, but can still be circumvented.)
Password cracking

Main article: Password cracking

Password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system. A common approach is to repeatedly try guesses for the password.
Packet sniffer

Main article: Packet sniffer

A packet sniffer is an application that captures data packets, which can be used to capture passwords and other data in transit over the network.
Spoofing attack (Phishing)

Main article: Spoofing attack

A spoofing attack involves one program, system, or website successfully masquerading as another by falsifying data and thereby being treated as a trusted system by a user or another program. The purpose of this is usually to fool programs, systems, or users into revealing confidential information, such as user names and passwords, to the attacker.
Rootkit

Main article: Rootkit

A rootkit is designed to conceal the compromise of a computer’s security, and can represent any of a set of programs which work to subvert control of an operating system from its legitimate operators. Usually, a rootkit will obscure its installation and attempt to prevent its removal through a subversion of standard system security. Rootkits may include replacements for system binaries so that it becomes impossible for the legitimate user to detect the presence of the intruder on the system by looking at process tables.
Social engineering

Main article: Social engineering (computer security)

When a Hacker, typically a black hat, is in the second stage of the targeting process, he or she will typically use some social engineering tactics to get enough information to access the network. A common practice for hackers who use this technique, is to contact the system administrator and play the role of a user who cannot get access to his or her system. Hackers who use this technique have to be quite savvy and choose the words they use carefully, in order to trick the system administrator into giving them information. In some cases only an employed help desk user will answer the phone and they are generally easy to trick. Another typical hacker approach is for the hacker to act like a very angry supervisor and when the his/her authority is questioned they will threaten the help desk user with their job. Social Engineering is very effective because users are the most vulnerable part of an organization. All the security devices and programs in the world won’t keep an organization safe if an employee gives away a password. Black Hat Hackers take advantage of this fact. Social Engineering can also be broken down into four sub-groups. These are intimidation, helpfulness, technical, and name-dropping.

Intimidation As stated above, with the angry supervisor, the hacker attacks the person who answers the phone with threats to their job. Many people at this point will accept that the hacker is a supervisor and give them the needed information.
Helpfulness Opposite to intimidation, helpfulness is taking advantage of a person’s natural instinct to help someone with a problem. The hacker will not get angry and instead act very distressed and concerned. The help desk is the most vulnerable to this type of Social Engineering, because it generally has the authority to change or reset passwords, which is exactly what the hacker needs.
Name-Dropping Simply put, the hacker uses the names of advanced users as “key words”, and gets the person who answers the phone to believe that they are part of the company because of this. Some information, like web page ownership, can be obtained easily on the web. Other information such as president and vice president names might have to be obtained via dumpster diving.
Technical Using technology is also a great way to get information. A hacker can send a fax or an email to a legitimate user in hopes to get a response containing vital information. Many times the hacker will act like he/she is involved with law enforcement and needs certain data for record keeping purposes or investigations.

Trojan horses

Main article: Trojan horse (computing)

A Trojan horse is a program which seems to be doing one thing, but is actually doing another. A trojan horse can be used to set up a back door in a computer system such that the intruder can gain access later. (The name refers to the horse from the Trojan War, with the conceptually similar function of deceiving defenders into bringing an intruder inside.)
Viruses

Main article: Computer virus

A virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. Therefore, a computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells.

While some are harmless or mere hoaxes, most computer viruses are considered malicious.
Worms

Main article: Computer worm

Like a virus, a worm is also a self-replicating program. A worm differs from a virus in that it propagates through computer networks without user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Many people conflate the terms “virus” and “worm”, using them both to describe any self-propagating program.
Key loggers

Main article: Keystroke logging

A key logger is a tool designed to record (‘log’) every keystroke on an affected machine for later retrieval. Its purpose is usually to allow the user of this tool to gain access to confidential information typed on the affected machine, such as a user’s password or other private data. Some key loggers use virus-, trojan-, and rootkit-like methods to remain active and hidden. However, some key loggers are used in legitimate ways and sometimes to even enhance computer security. As an example, a business might have a key logger on a computer used at a point of sale and data collected by the key logger could be used for catching employee fraud.

Notable intruders and criminal hackers

Main article: List of convicted computer criminals

Notable security hackers

Main article: List of hackers

Jacob Appelbaum is an Advocate, Security Researcher, and Developer for the Tor project. He speaks internationally for usage of Tor by human rights groups and others concerned about internet anonymity and censorship.
Albert Gonzalez sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Eric Corley (also known as Emmanuel Goldstein) is the long standing publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He is also the founder of the H.O.P.E. conferences. He has been part of the hacker community since the late ’70s.
Ed Cummings (also known as Bernie S) is the long standing writer for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He set legal precedence after denial of both a bail hearing and a speedy trial in 1995. Bernie S was charged with possession of technology which could be used for fraudulent purposes.
Dan Kaminsky is a DNS expert who exposed multiple flaws in the protocol and investigated Sony’s rootkit security issues in 2005. He has spoken in front of the US Senate on technology issues.
Gordon Lyon, known by the handle Fyodor, authored the Nmap Security Scanner as well as many network security books and web sites. He is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and Vice President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Gary McKinnon is a Scottish hacker facing extradition to the United States to face charges of perpetrating what has been described as a travesty of justice with many in the UK “show a little bit of compassion” to rule sooner who also suffers from Asperger syndrome.^[18]
Kevin Mitnick is a computer security consultant and author, formerly the most wanted computer criminal in United States history.^[19]
Rafael Núñez aka RaFa was a notorious most wanted hacker by the FBI since 2001.
Meredith L. Patterson a well known technologist and biohacker who has presented research with Dan Kamisky and Len Sassaman at many international security and hacker conferences.
Len Sassaman a Belgian computer programmer and technologist who was also a privacy advocate.
Solar Designer is the pseudonym of the founder of the Openwall Project.
Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) is a prominent security researcher.

Customs

The computer underground^[1] has produced its own slang and various forms of unusual alphabet use, for example 1337speak. Political attitude usually includes views for freedom of information, freedom of speech, a right for anonymity and most have a strong opposition against copyright.^{[citation needed]} Writing programs and performing other activities to support these views is referred to as hacktivism. Some go as far as seeing illegal cracking ethically justified for this goal; a common form is website defacement. The computer underground is frequently compared to the Wild West.^[20] It is common among hackers to use aliases for the purpose of concealing identity, rather than revealing their real names.

Hacker groups and conventions

Main articles: Hacker conference and Hacker group

The computer underground is supported by regular real-world gatherings called hacker conventions or “hacker cons”. These draw many people every year including SummerCon (Summer), DEF CON, HoHoCon (Christmas), ShmooCon (February), BlackHat, AthCon, Hacker Halted, and H.O.P.E..^{[citation needed]}. Local Hackfest groups organize and compete to develop skills to send a team to a prominent convention to compete in group pentesting, exploit and forensics on a wider scale. In the early 1980s Hacker Groups became popular, Hacker groups provided access to information and resources, and a place to learn from other members. BBS systems like Utopias provided a platform for information sharing via dialup. Hackers could also gain credibility by being affiliated with an elite group.^[21]

Hacking and the law

Netherlands

Article 138ab of Wetboek van Strafrecht prohibits computervredebreuk which is defined as intruding an automated work or a part thereof with intention and against the law. Intrusion is defined as access by means of:
- breaking through a security;
- by technical means;
- by false signals or a false key;
- by disguising, which is using a stolen username and password.

Maximum imprisonment is one year or a fine of the fourth category.^[22]^[23]

Hacking and the media

This section is in a list format that may be better presented using prose. You can help by converting this section to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. (August 2008)

Hacker magazines

Main category: Hacker magazines

The most notable hacker-oriented magazine publications are Phrack, Hakin9 and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. While the information contained in hacker magazines and ezines was often outdated, they improved the reputations of those who contributed by documenting their successes.^[21]

Hackers in fiction

Non-fiction books

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Second Edition by Jon Erickson
The Hacker Crackdown
The Art of Intrusion by Kevin D. Mitnick
The Art of Deception by Kevin D. Mitnick
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin D. Mitnick
The Hacker’s Handbook
The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll
Underground by Suelette Dreyfus
Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box, How to Own an Identity, and How to Own an Continent by various authors

Fiction books

References

Taylor, Paul A. (1999). Hackers. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-18072-6.

^ ^a ^b Sterling, Bruce (1993). “Part 2(d)”. The Hacker Crackdown. McLean, Virginia: IndyPublish.com. p. 61. ISBN 1-4043-0641-2.
^ Blomquist, Brian (May 29, 1999). “FBI’s Web Site Socked as Hackers Target Feds”. New York Post.
^ rfc 1983
^ S. Raymond, Eric. “Jargon File: Cracker”. Retrieved 2010-05-08. “Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker”
^ http://stallman.org/archives/2012-sep-dec.html#06_December_2012_%28Ecuadorian_white_hat_cracker_freed%29
^ Clifford, Ralph D. (2006). Cybercrime:The Investigation, Prosecution and Defense of a Computer-Related Crime Second Edition. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press.
^ ^a ^b Wilhelm, Douglas (2010). “2″. Professional Penetration Testing. Syngress Press. p. 503. ISBN 978-1-59749-425-0.
^ EC-Council
^ Moore, Robert (2005). Cybercrime: Investigating High Technology Computer Crime. Matthew Bender & Company. p. 258. ISBN 1-59345-303-5.Robert Moore
^ ^a ^b ^c Moore, Robert (2006). Cybercrime: Investigating High-Technology Computer Crime (1st ed.). Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson Publishing. ISBN 978-1-59345-303-9.
^ Thomas, Douglas (2002). Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-3346-3.
^ Andress, Mandy; Cox, Phil; Tittel, Ed. CIW Security Professional. New York, NY: Hungry Minds, Inc.. p. 638. ISBN 0-7645-4822-0.
^ “Blue hat hacker Definition”. PC Magazine Encyclopedia. Retrieved 31 May 2010. “A security professional invited by Microsoft to find vulnerabilities in Windows.”
^ Fried, Ina (June 15, 2005). “Blue Hat summit meant to reveal ways of the other side”. Microsoft meets the hackers. CNET News. Retrieved 31 May 2010.
^ Markoff, John (October 17, 2005). “At Microsoft, Interlopers Sound Off on Security”. New York Times. Retrieved 31 May 2010.
^ ^a ^b ^c Eric Chabrow (February 25, 2012). “7 Levels of Hackers: Applying An Ancient Chinese Lesson: Know Your Enemies”. GovInfo Security. Retrieved February 27, 2012.
^ Hacking approach
^ Writer, Staff (6 September 2012). [Gary McKinnon extradition ruling due by 16 October "Profile: Gary McKinnon"]. BBC News. Retrieved 2012-09-25.
^ “Kevin Mitnick sentenced to nearly four years in prison; computer hacker ordered to pay restitution …” (Press release). United States Attorney’s Office, Central District of California. 9 August 1999. Retrieved 10 April 2010.
^ Tim Jordan, Paul A. Taylor (2004). Hacktivism and Cyberwars. Routledge. pp. 133–134. ISBN 978-0-415-26003-9. “Wild West imagery has permeated discussions of cybercultures.”
^ ^a ^b Thomas, Douglas (2003). Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-8166-3346-3.
^ € 19,500
^ http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001854/TweedeBoek/TitelV/Artikel138ab/geldigheidsdatum_27-12-2012
^ Staples, Brent (May 11, 2003). “A Prince of Cyberpunk Fiction Moves Into the Mainstream”. The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-08-30. “Mr. Gibson’s novels and short stories are worshiped by hackers”^{[dead link]}

Related literature

Kevin Beaver (2010-01-12). Hacking For Dummies. ISBN 978-0-7645-5784-2.
Richard Conway, Julian Cordingley. Code Hacking: A Developer’s Guide to Network Security. ISBN 978-1-58450-314-9.
“Dot.Con: The Dangers of Cyber Crime and a Call for Proactive Solutions,” by Johanna Granville, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 49, no. 1. (Winter 2003), pp. 102–109.
Katie Hafner & John Markoff (1991). Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-68322-5.
David H. Freeman & Charles C. Mann (1997). @ Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-82464-7.
Suelette Dreyfus (1997). Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. Mandarin. ISBN 1-86330-595-5.
Bill Apro & Graeme Hammond (2005). Hackers: The Hunt for Australia’s Most Infamous Computer Cracker. Five Mile Press. ISBN 1-74124-722-5.
Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray & George Kurtz (1999). Hacking Exposed. Mcgraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-212127-0.
Michael Gregg (2006). Certfied Ethical Hacker. Pearson. ISBN 978-0-7897-3531-7.
Clifford Stoll (1990). The Cuckoo’s Egg. The Bodley Head Ltd. ISBN 0-370-31433-6.
Shon Harris, Allen Harper, Chris Eagle, Jonathan Ness & Michael Lester (2004). Gray Hat Hacking : The Ethical Hacker’s Handbook. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. ISBN 978-0072257090.

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Hacking

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Sunday, February 24, 2013

DARPA Rolls Out ‘Cyber Fast Track’ to Fund Hackers

August 5, 2011 | Filed under: Cyber | Posted by: Molly Mulrain

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency rolled out a new initiative this week that allows the Defense Department to easily fund projects for hackers and small security firms to help strengthen its cybersecurity efforts.

Peiter Zatko, DARPA project manager and former hacker, announced yesterday the launch of the “Cyber Fast Track” during his keynote speech at the Black Hat conference. The program, officially DARPA RA-11-52, is expected to fund between 20 and 100 cybersecurity software and research projects a year at “considerably under $1 million,” Zatko said.

“This effort will consider all types of cybersecurity research and development,” read the official DARPA announcement. “Of particular interest are efforts with the potential to reduce attack surface areas, reverse current asymmetries, or that are strategic, rather than tactical in nature. Proposed technologies may be hardware, software, or any combination thereof.”

Zatko explained he aimed to start funding hackers and security firms to make it easier for them to compete with the large, traditional government contractors. He believes the government has had difficulties in quickly mitigating cyber threats due to the rules and regulations set in place.

He hopes this new project will allow the government to work with hacking experts more quickly and efficiently. “One of the ways I see fixing it is bridging the gap between the government and the hacker community,” he said.

The initiative will have a quick turnaround time, responding to approved requests with contracts within 14 days. Developers would keep commercial intellectual property rights and the government would get government purpose rights.

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The New New Internet

Middle East

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 1, 2012 360 Comments

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Hasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press

Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz.

Multimedia

Graphic

How a Secret Cyberwar Program Worked

TimesCast Politics: Confront and Conceal

Interactive Feature

Iran, the United States and a Nuclear Seesaw

Iran Confirms Attack by Virus That Collects Information (May 30, 2012)
Facing Cyberattack, Iranian Officials Disconnect Some Oil Terminals From Internet (April 24, 2012)
Times Topic: Cyberattacks on Iran — Stuxnet and Flame

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Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.

“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

A Bush Initiative

The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just three years before.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so.

Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.

For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up — but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before.

The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.

The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.

Eventually the beacon would have to “phone home” — literally send a message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant. Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was simply to “throw a little sand in the gears” and buy some time. Mr. Bush was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort.

Breakthrough, Aided by Israel

It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground.

Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.

The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest, to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every aspect of the program.

Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.

Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground enrichment plant.

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.

“Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said.

Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others — both spies and unwitting accomplices — with physical access to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.”

In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code.

The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said.

The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.

Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.

“The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole “stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they fired people.”

Imagery recovered by nuclear inspectors from cameras at Natanz — which the nuclear agency uses to keep track of what happens between visits — showed the results. There was some evidence of wreckage, but it was clear that the Iranians had also carted away centrifuges that had previously appeared to be working well.

But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.

The Stuxnet Surprise

Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues, but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare in the East Room.

What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room, often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously.

“From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”

But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.

An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error.

The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose.

“I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.

Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games was still on.

A Weapon’s Uncertain Future

American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

This article is adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” to be published by Crown on Tuesday.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 1, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Order Sped Up Wave Of Cyberattacks Against Iran.

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360 Comments

Comments Closed

- Clyde Wynant
- Pittsburgh
- Verified
NYT Pick
It’s only a matter of time (and I’m sure it’s already happened at some level) that we’ll see a major disruption in the U.S. due to some form of worm, malware or other nasty code — and it could be far more devastating than 9/11. Imagine if the power grid were crashed or if the air traffic control system was compromised, even for a short time.
- June 1, 2012 at 7:52 a.m.
- Recommended71
- Ronald Cohen
- Wilmington, North Carolina
- Verified
NYT Pick
When the systems are all attacked and the viruses circulate the technological culture that we all live in will come crashing down. You won’t even be able to turn on the water tap! A war that doesn’t have casualties is too casual, too easy and we forget how dirty war is.
- June 1, 2012 at 8:13 a.m.
- Recommended32
- DonD
- Wake Forest, NC
NYT Pick
Excellent article, and confirms what many Middle East observers have suspected, at least in a general way. What is surprising is that President Bush chose a non-military option to address Iran’s pursuit of nukes, despite pressure from his VP, Cheney, and his administration’s neo-cons to use military force. More well known, similar neo-con pressure, as well as from the Israeli government, for use of military force has been used with President Obama.

A few observations:
1) For those arguing against the cyberwarfare approach, the alternative is massive airstrikes that would kill hundreds, if not thousands, while achieving no better results.

2) With a cyber attack, in lieu of military strikes, Iran threatens to retaliate with its own cyber attack, a prospect far more acceptable that Iranian military retaliation. The latter likely would include Iranian and Hezbollah missile attacks on Israel, naval and missile attacks on Persian Gulf oil shipments which would seriously affect the world’s economies, and inciting insurgencies by indigenous Shi’a populations within the oil producing Arabian Peninsula countries, threatening the entire region’s oil infrastructure.

3) What is not yet known is whether the cyber attacks have been encouraging Iran’s leaders to postpone, or even cease, its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Evidence of cleanup efforts at its Parchin nuclear complex suggests it may be preparing itself for allowing IAEA inspectors back in.
- June 1, 2012 at 9:05 a.m.
- Recommended20
- Michael S
- Wappingers Falls, NY
- Verified
NYT Pick
This is a two way street and the United States and other Western powers are just as vulnerable to cyber attack – perhaps more as so much infrastructure is dependent on the internet in advanced economies. While it takes a great deal of industrial development and government organization to make and deploy bombs, missiles and modern warships, there is no shortage of computing talent in less developed countries.
- June 1, 2012 at 11:41 a.m.
- Recommended18
- John S.
- Natick, Ma.
NYT Pick
Is this the best we can do to resolve our issues with Iran? Seems pretty bankrupt to me. Not to mention extremely dangerous and ill conceived. Should our leaders really being playing these dangerous games? Sooner or later someone might take exception, and more likely than not, it will not be the leaders, but the people who will suffer. So, if you are listening President Obama, I do not support this policy!
- June 1, 2012 at 12:30 p.m.
- Recommended26
- Design Partner
- Westchester Cty., NY
NYT Pick
What I don’t understand, aside from all the politics, is why anyone would have function-critical computers connected to any outside source including sources within the building. One would think that such computers would be totally isolated and that access be strictly limited. They could still display all operating data on screens for technicians to monitor but without granting access. Your car does this without allowing you to touch the actual EMS (Engine Management System) computer short of getting out some specialized tools and opening the processor housing and extracting the chips.

Maybe the techs in Iran find it more convenient to have access from remote terminals? Sometimes the sheer human desire to make work easier is the culprit. Now they may have to re-think their strategy.
- June 1, 2012 at 2:38 p.m.
- Recommended10
- Eugene Gorrin
- Union, NJ
NYT Pick
To all those involved with the development and implementation of Olympic Games, Stuxnet and all other computer program iniatives directed at Iran, I say bravo and thank you.

This is the way to do it – what used to be known as “gumming up the works.” But it’s even more than that. We know what Iran is doing and how they’re doing it – every email, every click, every result, etc. Ther’s no hiding – it’s all there for all to see.

And kudos to President Obama for his thoughtful, intelligent, smart and painstaking pursuit of the program, and his continuing guidance and involvement, seeing it through at each step and making the right decisions based on the newest developments. Well done, sir.

Everything is on the table as to Iran. President Obama and others have stated this and have never waivered- we say what we mean. If this cyberattack program, along with sanctions, diplomacy, negotiations and proferred concessions don’t work, at least we know and can say with our heads held high that we tried everything possible and went the extra mile before pursuing a military course of action.

And make no mistake. There will be a military solution if Iran does not come around.
- June 1, 2012 at 5:24 p.m.
- Recommended19
- mcmiljr
- MS
NYT Pick
While I applaud operations to protect our interests that don’t actually kill anyone, I also hate the fact that, even in cyberspace, we’re a bunch of chimps throwing bones at each other.
- June 2, 2012 at 9:38 a.m.
- Recommended7
- d’Albert Matlhoko
- melbourne, australia
NYT Pick
Though this is a low-risk ‘double-edged sword’ , electronic disruption of the technical means is by far a more laudable move than bombing Iran or assassinating its young Nuclear Physicists ! This is a very prudent decision that President Obama and his Military advisors have taken
- June 2, 2012 at 9:40 a.m.
- Recommended8

IDF says engaged in ‘constant cyber battle’

In special interview, Maj.-Gen Uzi Moskovitz, head of IDF’s communication branch, speaks about army’s cyber warfare efforts

Yoav Zitun

Published:

02.24.13, 15:53 / Israel News

The IDF fends off hundreds of cyber attacks every year, Major-General Uzi Moskovitz, head of the IDF’s Computer Services Directorate, revealed Sunday, in a special interview with Ynet.

According to Moskovitz, the military diligently counters cyber attacks that threaten the IDF’s secure operational computer systems – systems which in turn facilitate weapons systems used by the troops on the ground, and whose failure holds soldiers lives in the balance.

Achilles heel

In practice, Moskovitz is charged with providing direct, immediate and secure lines of communication, deep in enemy territory, in difficult terrain, between elite forces, whole battalions and even navy forces – a situation that failed to actualize in the summer of 2006 and turned into army’s Achilles heel.

“Almost every weapons system in operation today comes equipped with a built-in information and communication system. In Operation Pillar of Defense , the regiments deployed across the Gaza border were all connected, both with one another as well as with the Air Force, the Navy, the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence,” Moskovitz explained.

The significance of this is a field commander’s ability to receive real-time and local intelligence as he fights. This assists his in the field in a multitude of ways, including tactics optimization and minimizing casualties.

Real-time data (Photo: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)

“The strategic implication is that the ground forces can complete twice the number of missions in a given time period, all the while taking fewer risk and using less resources.”

When it comes to fighting the treat posed by hundreds of thousands of missiles these advanced systems prove invaluable, significantly improving the IDF’s ability to minimize the assault on the home front.

‘Clearing the field’

The skills involved in the daily work of the Shoham and Lesem units within the directorate are implemented in special operations as well, where they serve to form a military-technological framework for the operations.

“Before leaving for the mission, the force needs to ‘clear the field’ beforehand, so as to allow secure communications with Israel for a number of days, which includes the transferring of data,” Moskovitz explains.

The IDF’s pioneering work in the field has garnered the United States’ interest in its systems and implementation doctorates.

During a directorate visit to the US, the Americans were apparently stunned at the system’s capabilities, specifically its ability to allow any relevant commander to pull up information regarding any patrol or sector on any screen – whether in his office, jeep or in the field – and pinpoint the stage of the patrol or the location of an infiltrating enemy.

The system, it seems, is able to pinpoint, in real-time, for any commander, any object in the Middle East. Without these advance systems, the IDF’s output would be like it was 30 years ago.

“The IAF is the IDF’s strategic weapon, and their attack capacity has increased three-to-five fold in comparison to pre-system times,” Moskovitz concludes.

Ron Ben-Yishai contributed to this report

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Israeli hacker team brings down Iranian websites

By YAAKOV LAPPIN

LAST UPDATED: 01/26/2012 17:08

English-language Iranian media outlet Press TV, Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education are hacked and taken offline.

Screenshot of hacked Iranian website Photo: Screenshot

Israeli hackers brought down Iran’s Press TV website and two websites belonging to the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education on Thursday.

The hackers, who call themselves IDF Team, said their actions were a response to a series of attacks on Israeli sites the previous day.

Three additional Iranian sites were hacked and their servers altered to display an Israeli flag and anti-Arab text in English.

Press TV, the Iranian regime’s English language satellite channel, was unavailable following the announcement by the hackers.

“At 16:30 Israel Clock the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education website will be down until further notice. In addition to Iran’s television network, broadcasting in English round-the-clock, based in Tehran that [is] called Press TV will be down until further notice,” the hackers wrote in a message.

“Ahmadinejad what do you have to say about that?” they added.

The attack represents the latest chapter in an Internet feud that began early January when an Arab hacker published tens of thousands of Israeli credit card numbers on the Internet.

Earlier, IDF Team told The Jerusalem Post it was preparing a response after the websites of two Israeli hospitals – the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer and the private Assouta hospital network – were taken offline on Wednesday.

IDF Team has played a pivotal part in Israeli counter-strikes on high-profile Arab websites following attacks by Arab hackers. The team appears to have employed a combination of attacks to disable the Iranian websites on Thursday, by launching distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) attacks and breaking into Iranian servers.

On Wednesday, the Haaretz Hebrew website was downed by pro-Palestinian hackers. Haaretz said it saw a message claiming responsibility for the attack by hackers calling themselves “Anonymous Palestine.” The website of the financial news site The Marker was also unavailable Wednesday.

Last week, Israeli hackers brought down the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency website and the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange site, in retaliation for a DDoS attack on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the El Al websites.

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Hackerspaces Global Space Program

Hackerspaces Global Space Program
Why	What would be the best way to build a starship able to reach the stars after decades of travel? This question is what has been asked by DARPA and NASA AMES in their “100 YEAR STARSHIP™ STUDY”. Our answer: a global consortium of Hackerspaces!
Where	Noisebridge, Xinchejian, Alpha One Labs, Maui Makers, Connected Community, Tetalab
Who
More Info	http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/spaceprogram, http://xinchejian.com/2011/06/04/xinchejian-and-the-100-year-starship-study/, https://docs.google.com/#folders/0B-PYJiOSewXLMHRObk8zWFZScjJCS3h6YWV0WG1JUQ
Tags	space stars development darpa 100yss grant

Several hackerspaces around the world are working on projects related to space. The aim of the Hackerspace Global Space Program is to coordinate between hackerspaces to enhance cooperation and reduce reinvention of the wheel. We want to highlight how Hackerspaces communities globally can be used for the research and development of this long term effort.

Currently, we have representation from:

Shanghai, China (Xin Che Jian)
New York, USA (Alpha One Labs)
Hawaii, USA (Maui: Maui Makers)
Melbourne, Australia (Connected Community Hacker Space)
Toulouse, France (Tetalab) (not officially part of DARPA program, yet)
Alabama, USA (Makers Local 256)

The project started in 2011 in response to DARPA’s 100 Year Starship program (http://www.100yss.org). Unfortunately we didn’t succeed in attaining funding on that program, however we resubmitted and were selected under another DARPA program. …

[edit] DARPA funded Hackerspace Space Program

The Hackerspace Space program was selected in April 2012 by DARPA for a $500,000 grant. As of May 2012, we are in early contract negotiations. Few of the details have been nailed down, but basically we get $250,000 for 2 years which we pass along to member hackerspaces for education and research projects.

Most of the documents relating to the program are in this Google Doc Folder. In particular see the HSP Proposal (no-edit) and ByLaws (actively being revised – join in).

Please read the documents for more information and, if interested, join the discussion mail list …

[edit] HSP Proposal

Of particular relevance is the Proposal, which consists of two volumes:

(note these are now locked and not editable – so we know what DARPA selected)

Some key excerpts:

We propose a HSP organization (that…) will enable scalable grassroots community units collaborating with each other and with interested partners around the world to carry out activities dedicated to the enhancement of humanity’s survivability.

such as expanding humanity’s reach and presence beyond Earth orbit.
to help us survive and thrive in space, as well as improving our chances here on Earth by spurring the innovation needed to solve global challenges, resource constraints and the need to get along in an increasingly crowded environment.

Technical approach … is to support and fund Hackerspaces to function as local community hubs, carry out research and public engagement activities, conduct long term strategic foresight and planning to coordinate large scale international projects with the local hubs and lastly, to identify and expand areas of mutual relevance between terrestrial and space activities.

The HSP mission is to:

Enable Hackerspaces as local community hubs to carry out research and public engagement activities (such as leadership and technical workshops for youth) to support the HSP vision in concert with external partners
Apply principles from strategic foresight and planning for the central leadership to coordinate large scale international projects with the local hubs and project partners
Identify and expand areas of mutual relevance between terrestrial and space activities

[edit] Prior Project Pages

The info from here down was here prior to May 16, 2012 edit. It reflects notes and ideas that are probably very relevant.

[edit] Project Fundamentals

(not yet updated with info from DARPA HSP)

Manifesto – what are we doing and why?
Structure – how is the project structured? how do we do what we do?
Communication – what channels do we use to communicate within the group and with others?
Coordination – how do we work with hackerspaces/fablabs/academia/etc?
Legal – organisation setup, project licensing
Ethics
Finance – how do we finance the project? and what do we do with the money once we have it?
Marketing – how do we convey the vision and build motivation to participate? (both within hackerspaces and the wider world)
People – who is involved? who does what?
Projects
Partners

This page was last modified on 22 May 2012, at 06:02.
This page has been accessed 1,132 times.

Slashdot

DARPA Commits To Funding Useful Hacking Projects

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 07 2011, @07:27AM
from the good-work-if-you-can-hack-it dept.

Hugh Pickens writes “Fahmida Y. Rashid reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will fund new cyber-security proposals under the new Cyber-Fast Track project intended to cut red tape for hackers to apply for funding for projects that would help the Defense Department secure computer networks, says Peiter Zatko, a hacker known as Mudge who was one of the seven L0pht members who testified before a Senate committee in 1998 that they could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes and is now a program manager for the agency’s information innovation office. Anything that could help the military will be considered, including bug-hunting exercises, commodity high-end computing and open software tools and projects with the potential to ‘reduce attack surface areas, reverse current asymmetries’ are of particular interest. Under the Cyber-Fast Track initiative, DARPA will fund between 20 to 100 projects annually. Open to anybody, researchers can pitch DARPA with ideas and have a project approved and funded within 14 days of the application.”

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Honey Pot? (Score:2, Offtopic)

Could this be a giant honey pot?
- 8 hidden comments
- - - Re:
      
      The US government is comprised of humans. Humans have proven to be untrustworthy.
      
      On the other hand, some humans are also trustworthy. Shit. How can I apply both of these into one absurd gross generalisation?
      - Re:
        
        Re a few absurd gross historical generalisation?
        A 56k using UFO hunter used a perl script to glide around a set of wide open MS “mil” US networks.
        The CIA has In-Q-Tel like fronts to seek any useful project at any price and nobody will know.
        DARPA has…. like fronts and nobody will know.
        The US has usually found solutions to its language, math, computer, crypto, science ect. issues very quickly, with less press and with lots of cash.
        Yet now we are to believe the US suffers from unique bug related, surfac
        
        Re:
        
        Well, they did just lose their “AAA” credit rating..
  - Re:
    
    You mean like the Pentagon did in Iraq?
Finally (Score:1)

For the cost of a few cruise missiles humanity will be left with something of value from the defense budget.

Hopefully this becomes a superfund for cleaning up vulnerabilities by the best and the brightest. With all the money wasted every year we should not agonize over tiny sums being expedited to people who will catch the bugs and disclose to the public.

The cybercrime gangs are well funded. The bughunters are not.

Prevention is much cheaper and much more friendly towards civil liberties than is having a cyb
Mudge? This might actaully work then. (Score:5, Interesting)

by sp332 (781207) on Sunday August 07 2011, @08:00AM (#37013590)

If you recall,there was a campaign to make Mudge the USA cyber-czar back when Obama created that post. The guy knows what he’s doing, and even now that he’s in big-government stuff, the community still trusts him.

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Infinite Military Money (Score:3)

by Doc Ruby (173196) on Sunday August 07 2011, @08:23AM (#37013682) Homepage Journal

The military/intel is totally protected from our debt crisis, no matter how distantly related to protecting us any of its expenses might be. That’s why the majority of our debt is owed for past military/intel budgets – so it costs 50% more in interest than what was appropriated on paper. And now that the debt has gotten our credit rating downgraded, it will cost us even more in interest – along with all our borrowing that it’s dragged along with it.

So the smart people will turn all their projects into military/intel projects. Which will gradually turn the US into not just a hopeless debtor, but an exclusively warmongering hopeless debtor.

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- 1 hidden comment
- Re:
  
  Very true. I know the company I work for loves these programs, there is no risk since it is guaranteed money if you win the contracts. It also diverts engineering resources into supporting these programs.
- Re:
  
  This is why the citizens of any democracy should be on guard, demanding answers from their representatives about spending etc. to ensure that such things do not happen. This is indirect war profiteering in it’s finest form.
  - Re:
    
    Like “why are we invading Iraq when it had nothing to do with the 9/11/2001 attacks”?
    
    Those of us who did ask that question were drowned out by the majority of voters who insisted on re-electing Bush/Cheney instead of impeaching and imprisoning them.
    - 2 hidden comments
    - - Re:
        
        Well, what’s actually more true is that “in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve”. Maybe that means we deserve the government we get.
        
        As far as holding public office being the only way to change it, that’s clearly not true. Indeed the biggest problem in America’s democracy is that our republic, the elected people, are not the ones who make change. They’re lackeys to the people who do make the change. And those people are not only the rich. Plenty of not rich (outside their expenses-paid po
    - - Re:
        
        In what area? Iraq? No jumped-up mullah in Iraq or anywhere else except Afghanistan did anything to us on 9/11/2001. GWB showed the UN and the world that even when the US was hideously attacked, all he cared about was invading a country that had nothing to do with it. So his cronies could make $TRILLIONS and grab as much power for as long as they could, while smashing our obligations to protect us. All of which is precisely Binladen and his fellow assholes wanted.
        
        And so you voted for Bush twice, giving us t
        
        Re:
        
        Damn near every middle-eastern and N Africa country funds and provides political protection for groups committing terrorists acts all over the world. In a comment above someone said that the people in the US are directly responsible for the consequences of thier government policies so why shouldn’t that same principle be true for all countries? This isn’t just about 9/11. I am against the wars in Iraq, Libya,and Afghanistan and would have preferred to leave Iraq alone and allow them to continue their own
Just make sure (Score:1)

Just make sure the funding check clears. It is issued by the US government after all and their credit isn’t as good as it once was.
That is all well and good. (Score:1)

But what is DARPA, or anyone else for that matter, about making sure chips made in china don’t have bugs built in?

I/refuse/ to purchase an item that is known to me to have chips made in china because I believe it to be compromised.

How can one be sure that the hardware in the devices made there are not bugged?
- 1 hidden comment
Non Americans (Score:2)

But can non-Americans apply ? You know, this category of persons that form 85% of Internet.
Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats (Score:2)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/ [sourceforge.net]

At least I could spin it that way…:-)

And have:
“The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.”
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 [google.com]

Where do I apply?:-)
- Re:
  
  I see where to apply, a link in one of the articles:
  https://www.fbo.gov/?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=406db188e0e1935a806c143a5603eb48&tab=core&_cview=0 [fbo.gov]
  
  If slashdot allowed longer tittle I woudl have called it: “Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats AND OPPORTUNITIES”
  
  We’ll see if they like some variation on:
  http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 [google.com]
  “Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have a
- Re:
  
  I wrote this up last month as a proposal abstract for an IARPA soliciation, but I have not sent it (someone who had been with the CIA and does public intelligence said it would be pointless essentially as the US intelligence community is so broken). Anyway, I though I’d post it here, as I’ve written it already, and it seems a shame to waste it, and because it is what I’d like to do maybe for this solicitation. Any constructive feedback would be appreciated. Maybe DARPA might be interested in it if not IARP
I have a brilliant idea! (Score:2)

I’m going to seek a $20k grant to advise police agencies against having their website developed by BJM marketing.

In case you are wondering what the hell I’m talking about: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218961/AntiSec_hackers_dump_data_after_hacking_police_websites [computerworld.com]
Why not insist on free and open source? (Score:2)

From the reuters article: “Addressing a key issue for hackers doing government projects, they will be allowed to keep the commercial intellectual property rights while giving the Defense Department use of the project.”
Major problem with entire solicitation design (Score:2)

I skimmed through the solicitation. It has people paid on achieving milestones they set out in advance (and they say ideally for two month or four month working time frames). Essentially, they are insisting on a waterfall development model. That makes difficult any basic research and general creativity in exploring topic areas. I guess someone could get around that a bit by promising a report or something, but that is probably not what they are looking for.

In general it is a rule of thumb in some projects b
- 1 hidden comment
- - Re:
    
    It’s a joke with lot of truth to it. My undergrad adviser said he used this model sometimes (he’s 90 or so now, so probably OK to mention this). He said he would essentially get a grant for work he had already (mostly) done, and then use much of the money to do the next thing. So, you are right, it’s an interesting and sometimes successful model.
    
    A much deeper problem is that the people good at looking good may not be the same people good at doing stuff. As someone suggested recently (forget where, maybe on
Hudson says…. (Score:1)

Sarge, is this going to be a stand up fight, or just another bug-hunt?
- Re:
  
  There may be a xenomorph involved.
Social Media Protocals (Score:2)

Open Protocols for Social Media would be very helpful..

Think along the lines of Diaspora and Google+ but within a military context, where each command/outfit, etc. needs to own it’s own data, various aspects of data needs to shared (nor not shared) based on a firm but flexible set of permissions and you have a fairly ideal way of allowing modern war fighting use social tools; all of those still on secure networks but having a wide range of secure sharing. This could include pushing data out to non secure ne

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‘Mudge’ Announces New DARPA Hacker Spaces Program

Former L0pht hacker-turned DARPA executive launches a new federal program to fast-track research by indie and small-firm hackersAug 04, 2011 | 11:14 PM | 0 Comments

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Dark Reading
BLACK HAT USA 2011 — Las Vegas — Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, famed member of the legendary L0pht hacker group, announced the launch here today of a new program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aimed at funding hacker spaces and research in cybersecurity.

Click here for more of Dark Reading’s Black Hat articles.

Mudge, who has been the program manager for the information innovation office at DARPA for a year now, says the idea behind the new DARPA-RA-11-52 initiative is to fast-track security research among independent researchers and small, boutique security firms. The program is called Cyber Fast Track.

“It’s time to start funding hacker spaces, labs, and boutique security companies to make it easier to compete with large government contractors” for research money, Mudge said in his keynote address here today. “When I was at L0pht, we all had day jobs and did our [research] in the off-hours of the night … I want a lot of people who are doing cool research work all day long to not have to have day jobs and do their big work at night.”

Mudge says the new DARPA-RA-11-52 project will aim to fund somewhere between 20 to 100 projects per year, with a straightforward proposal template that streamlines and simplifies the traditionally onerous application process for DARPA funding. The contracts will be awarded around 10 days from their submission.

“And you get to keep your IP,” he said.

It has been difficult for hackers to interface with DARPA with the previous model. “The way the government is set up, it’s almost impossible for small boutique firms and hackers to actually say, ‘I’m doing cool research work, and how do I get funding without giving up IP to venture capitalists or ownership,’ or getting purchased by a large government contractor and your company basically being gutted,” he said.

DARPA’s Mudge is in the process of traveling around the country visiting hackerspaces and briefing them on the new fast-track program. “What’s good for this community is good for DARPA,” he said.

The Cyber Fast Track website is here.

Have a comment on this story? Please click “Add Your Comment” below. If you’d like to contact Dark Reading’s editors directly, send us a message.

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hack

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hack¹ (hk)

v. hacked, hack·ing, hacks

v.tr.

1. To cut or chop with repeated and irregular blows: hacked down the saplings.

2. To break up the surface of (soil).

a. Informal To alter (a computer program): hacked her text editor to read HTML.

b. To gain access to (a computer file or network) illegally or without authorization: hacked the firm’s personnel database.

4. Slang To cut or mutilate as if by hacking: hacked millions off the budget.

5. Slang To cope with successfully; manage: couldn’t hack a second job.

v.intr.

1. To chop or cut something by hacking.

2. Informal

a. To write or refine computer programs skillfully.

b. To use one’s skill in computer programming to gain illegal or unauthorized access to a file or network: hacked into the company’s intranet.

3. To cough roughly or harshly.

1. A rough, irregular cut made by hacking.

2. A tool, such as a hoe, used for hacking.

3. A blow made by hacking.

4. A rough, dry cough.

[Middle English hakken, from Old English -haccian; see keg- in Indo-European roots. V., intr., sense 2, back-formation from hacker.]

hacka·ble adj.

hack² (hk)

1. A horse used for riding or driving; a hackney.

2. A worn-out horse for hire; a jade.

a. One who undertakes unpleasant or distasteful tasks for money or reward; a hireling.

b. A writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing.

4. A carriage or hackney for hire.

5. Informal

a. A taxicab.

b. See hackie.

v. hacked, hack·ing, hacks

v.tr.

1. To let out (a horse) for hire.

2. To make banal or hackneyed with indiscriminate use.

v.intr.

1. To drive a taxicab for a living.

2. To work for hire as a writer.

3. To ride on horseback at an ordinary pace.

adj.

1. By, characteristic of, or designating routine or commercial writing: hack prose.

2. Hackneyed; banal.

Phrasal Verb:

hack out Informal

To produce (written material, for example), especially hastily or routinely: hacked out a weekly column.

[Short for hackney.]

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hack¹

1. (when intr, usually foll by at or away) to cut or chop (at) irregularly, roughly, or violently

2. to cut and clear (a way, path, etc.), as through undergrowth

3. (Team Sports / Rugby) (in sport, esp rugby) to foul (an opposing player) by kicking or striking his shins

4. (Team Sports / Basketball) Basketball to commit the foul of striking (an opposing player) on the arm

5. (Medicine / Pathology) (intr) to cough in short dry spasmodic bursts

6. (Communication Arts / Journalism & Publishing) (tr) to reduce or cut (a story, article, etc.) in a damaging way

7. (Electronics & Computer Science / Computer Science) to manipulate a computer program skilfully, esp, to gain unauthorized access to another computer system

8. (tr) Slang to tolerate; cope with I joined the army but I couldn’t hack it

hack to bits to damage severely his reputation was hacked to bits

1. a cut, chop, notch, or gash, esp as made by a knife or axe

2. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Agriculture) any tool used for shallow digging, such as a mattock or pick

3. a chopping blow

4. (Medicine / Pathology) a dry spasmodic cough

5. (Team Sports / Rugby) a kick on the shins, as in rugby

6. a wound from a sharp kick

[Old English haccian; related to Old Frisian hackia, Middle High German hacken]

hack²

1. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) a horse kept for riding or (more rarely) for driving

2. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) an old, ill-bred, or overworked horse

3. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) a horse kept for hire

4. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) Brit a country ride on horseback

5. a drudge

6. (Communication Arts / Journalism & Publishing) a person who produces mediocre literary or journalistic work

7. (Engineering / Automotive Engineering) Also called hackney US a coach or carriage that is for hire

8. (Engineering / Automotive Engineering) Also called hackie US informal

a. a cab driver

b. a taxi

1. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) Brit to ride (a horse) cross-country for pleasure

2. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) (tr) to let (a horse) out for hire

3. (Communication Arts / Journalism & Publishing) (tr) Informal to write (an article) as or in the manner of a hack

4. (Engineering / Automotive Engineering) (intr) US informal to drive a taxi

adj

(prenominal) banal, mediocre, or unoriginal hack writing

[short for hackney]

hack³

1. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Agriculture) a rack used for fodder for livestock

2. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Falconry) a board on which meat is placed for a hawk

3. (Miscellaneous Technologies / Building) a pile or row of unfired bricks stacked to dry

vb (tr)

1. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Agriculture) to place (fodder) in a hack

2. (Miscellaneous Technologies / Building) to place (bricks) in a hack

[variant of hatch²]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

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Hack of smokers—Lipton, 1970.

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ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words Antonyms

Noun	1.	hack – one who works hard at boring tasks drudge, hacker unskilled person – a person who lacks technical training plodder, slogger – someone who works slowly and monotonously for long hours
	2.	hack – a politician who belongs to a small clique that controls a political party for private rather than public ends machine politician, political hack, ward-heeler pol, political leader, politico, politician – a person active in party politics
	3.	hack – a mediocre and disdained writer hack writer, literary hack Grub Street – the world of literary hacks author, writer – writes (books or stories or articles or the like) professionally (for pay)
	4.	hack – a tool (as a hoe or pick or mattock) used for breaking up the surface of the soil tool – an implement used in the practice of a vocation
	5.	hack – a car driven by a person whose job is to take passengers where they want to go in exchange for money taxi, taxicab, cab auto, automobile, car, motorcar, machine – a motor vehicle with four wheels; usually propelled by an internal combustion engine; “he needs a car to get to work” gypsy cab – a taxicab that cruises for customers although it is licensed only to respond to calls minicab – a minicar used as a taxicab fleet – group of motor vehicles operating together under the same ownership
	6.	hack – an old or over-worked horse nag, jade, plug Equus caballus, horse – solid-hoofed herbivorous quadruped domesticated since prehistoric times
	7.	hack – a horse kept for hire Equus caballus, horse – solid-hoofed herbivorous quadruped domesticated since prehistoric times
	8.	hack – a saddle horse used for transportation rather than sport etc. mount, riding horse, saddle horse – a lightweight horse kept for riding only
Verb	1.	hack – cut with a hacking tool chop ax, axe – chop or split with an ax; “axe wood” cut – separate with or as if with an instrument; “Cut the rope”
	2.	hack – be able to manage or manage successfully; “I can’t hack it anymore”; “she could not cut the long days in the office” cut get by, grapple, make do, cope, manage, contend, deal, make out – come to terms with; “We got by on just a gallon of gas”; “They made do on half a loaf of bread every day”
	3.	hack – cut away; “he hacked his way through the forest” cut – separate with or as if with an instrument; “Cut the rope”
	4.	hack – kick on the arms basketball, basketball game, hoops – a game played on a court by two opposing teams of 5 players; points are scored by throwing the ball through an elevated horizontal hoop foul – commit a foul; break the rules
	5.	hack – kick on the shins rugby, rugby football, rugger – a form of football played with an oval ball foul – commit a foul; break the rules
	6.	hack – fix a computer program piecemeal until it works; “I’m not very good at hacking but I’ll give it my best” hack on programme, program – write a computer program
	7.	hack – significantly cut up a manuscript cut up edit, redact – prepare for publication or presentation by correcting, revising, or adapting; “Edit a book on lexical semantics”; “she edited the letters of the politician so as to omit the most personal passages”
	8.	hack – cough spasmodically; “The patient with emphysema is hacking all day” whoop cough – exhale abruptly, as when one has a chest cold or congestion; “The smoker coughs all day”

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hack¹

verb

1. (sometimes with away) cut, chop, slash, mutilate, mangle, gash, hew, lacerate He desperately hacked through the undergrowth. Some were hacked to death with machetes.

2. (Informal) stand, take, bear, handle, cope with, stomach, endure, tolerate, abide, put up with (informal) I can’t hack all the violence

3. (Informal) cough, bark, wheeze, rasp the patients splutter and hack

noun

(Informal) cough, bark, wheeze, rasp smoker’s hack

be hacked off (Informal) be annoyed, be fed up, be irked (by), be scunnered (Scot.) She was jealous, hacked off with the producer, but mostly with herself.

hack it (Informal) cope, manage, handle it, survive, get along, get by he couldn’t hack it as a solo performer

hack something off cut off, chop off, lop off a man’s arm was hacked off at the elbow

hack²

noun

1. reporter, writer, correspondent, journalist, scribbler, contributor, hackette (derogatory), literary hack, penny-a-liner, Grub Street writer tabloid hacks, always eager to find victims

2. yes-man, lackey, toady, flunky, brown-noser (taboo slang) party hacks from the old days still hold influential jobs

adjective

unoriginal, pedestrian, mediocre, poor, tired, stereotyped, banal, undistinguished, uninspired ill-paid lectureships and hack writing

Collins Thesaurus of the English Language – Complete and Unabridged 2nd Edition. 2002 © HarperCollins Publishers 1995, 2002

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Translations

Select a language: ———————–

hack

v hack [hӕk]

1 to cut or chop up roughly The butcher hacked the beef into large pieces.

2 to cut (a path etc) roughly He hacked his way through the jungle; He hacked (out) a path through the jungle.

1 a rough cut made in something He marked the tree by making a few hacks on the trunk.

2 a horse, or in the United States, a car, for hire.

n hacker

1 a person who illegally gains access to information stored in other people’s computers.

2 a computer enthusiast.

adj hacking

(of a cough) rough and dry He has had a hacking cough for weeks.

n hacksaw

a saw for cutting metals.

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hack →

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Mentioned in	?		References in classic literature	?		Dictionary browser	?		Full browser	?
cabby cabdriver Grub Street hack driver hack on hack out hack saw hack writer hack-driver hacker hacking hacking jacket hackle hackles hackney hacksaw literary hack livery driver machine politician			He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook. Don Quixote by Cervantes, Miguel View in context I jumped into a hack and went about my business, and it was in this hack–this immortal, historical hack–that the curious thing I speak of occurred. The American by James, Henry View in context Inside the mill were twenty of the miller’s men hewing a stone, and as they went ‘Hick hack, hick hack, hick hack,’ the mill went ‘Click clack, click clack, click clack. Fairy Tales by Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm View in context More results			habituate habituation habitude Habitue habitué Habiture habitus Hable Hablot Knight Browne Habnab haboob Habsburg habu HAC hacek hácek hacendado Hachiman Hachinohe Hachioji hachure hachuring hacienda Hacienda Heights haciendado hack hack about hack down hack driver hack hammer hack off hack on hack out hack saw hack up hack writer hack-driver hackamore hackberry Hackbolt Hackbuss hackbut Hackee Hackelia Hackensack hacker hackery hackette hackie hacking hacking jacket			Hachoir HACHP HACHS hachure hachure hachured hachured hachures hachures hachuring hachuring HACI Hacia hacienda hacienda Hacienda Business Park Hacienda Community Development Corporation Hacienda Heights Hacienda Heights, California Hacienda La Puente Unified School District Hacienda Real Hacienda San Rafael Ukum Hacienda system Hacienda system haciendado haciendados Haciendas Haciendas HACIL Hacilar hack Hack (disambiguation) Hack (disambiguation) Hack (disambiguation) Hack (disambiguation) hack about Hack Addict hack apart hack around hack at hack attack hack down hack down hack driver hack hammer Hack in the Box Hack license hack mode hack off hack off hack off hack off hack off hack on hack on hack out hack out hack out hack out hack out hack out of

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EADS, ThyssenKrupp attacked by Chinese hackers – report

Quotes

European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company EADS NV

EAD.PA

€35.89

+0.59+1.67%

02/22/2013

ThyssenKrupp AG

TKAG.DE

€17.27

+0.12+0.70%

02/22/2013

FRANKFURT | Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:18pm GMT

(Reuters) – Airbus parent EADS and German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp recorded major attacks by Chinese hackers in 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported, citing unidentified people within the two companies.

That is a trend seen throughout the German economy, where companies are increasingly being attacked by Chinese hackers, the magazine said, citing information from the German government.

A spokesman for EADS told Reuters the attacks were “standard attacks” and the company was working closely with government authorities on the issue of cyber security.

ThyssenKrupp also confirmed an attack, saying it took place in the United States from a Chinese internet address and that it had no information as to what data the attackers obtained, according to Der Spiegel.

ThyssenKrupp was not immediately available for comment when tried by Reuters. The Chinese embassy in Berlin and the German economy ministry were also not immediately available to comment.

When confronted with similar accusations in the past, China‘s Defence Ministry has issued a flat denial and said hacking is a global problem and that China is one of world’s biggest victims of cyber assaults.

Germany‘s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution recorded almost 1,100 digital attacks from foreign secret services in 2012, mostly targeted on politicians involved with energy and finance, Der Spiegel said.

Chinese hackers tend to take aim at the largest corporations and most innovative technology companies, using trick emails that appear to come from trusted colleagues but bear attachments tainted with viruses, spyware and other malicious software, according to Western cyber investigators.

(Reporting by Peter Dinkloh, Tim Hepher and Alexandra Hudson; Editing by Mark Potter)

EADS develops ‘hacker-proof’ internet technology

EADS is in talks with the Pentagon about supplying the system

By Russell Hotten, Industry Editor

12:01AM BST 12 Sep 2007

Comment

A team of researchers and engineers at a UK division of Franco-German aerospace giant EADS has developed what it believes is the world’s first hacker-proof encryption technology for the internet.

The system, on display at this week’s DSEi defence equipment show in London, is already being tested in some government departments, but EADS also sees huge commercial opportunities in sectors such as banking.

Hacking into defence organisations has become a hot topic with recent allegations that the Chinese tried to break into military systems in the UK and America. Yesterday, the Chinese countered with claims that it “was frequently” the victim of cyber-attacks by the West.

EADS’s Ectocryp system was developed at the company’s defence and security division, based in Newport, south Wales. The team spent three years building on technology developed by boffins at the Government’s GCHQ listening station.

Gordon Duncan, the division’s government and commercial sales manager, said he was convinced that sensitive data could now be sent across the world without fear of it being spied on by hackers. “All the computer technology in the world cannot break it,” he said yesterday.

At the heart of the system is the lightning speed with which the “keys” needed to enter the computer systems can be scrambled and re-formatted. Just when a hacker thinks he or she has broken the code, the code changes. “There is nothing to compare with it,” said Mr Duncan.

EADS is in talks with the Pentagon about supplying the US military with the system, although some American defence companies are also working on what they believe will be fool-proof encryption systems.

However, Mr Duncan said the technology could be used far outside defence. Financial institutions, and particularly banks operating internet customer accounts, were very interested in the technology, he said.

Meanwhile, a Saudi Arabian order for 72 Eurofighter Typhoons from BAE Systems was “very close”, the leader of the UK’s defence export group said. Alan Garwood, head of the Defence Export Service Organisation (DESO), said Saudi Arabia would order 72 of the combat planes.

“I can’t say any more than that – it’s very close,” he said at the DSEi yesterday. The order would be the biggest for the fighter jet apart from those placed by the programme’s four partner countries – the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain – which are scheduled to take 620. The biggest buyer is Britain, which has committed to 232 planes.

Mr Garwood declined to comment on the value of the contract, although it is thought to be valued at £20bn including a long-term maintenance and support programme.

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Facebook attacked in ‘sophisticated’ hack

February 15 2013 | Finance

Facebook has revealed its computer system was “targeted in a sophisticated attack” last month, but that it found no evidence any user data were compromised.

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Facebook hacked in ‘sophisticated’ attack

February 16 2013 | Technology

Facebook has revealed it has been targeted a “sophisticated attack” by hackers who exploited a previously unknown loophole in its computer system.

Burger King’s Twitter account hacked

February 18 2013 | Brennan Murray | Technology

Burger King’s Twitter account appeared to have fallen victim to hackers on Monday as it began sending out pro-McDonald’s messages and the occasional rap video.

Apple releases malware removal tool after being hit by computer …

February 20 2013 | Technology

Apple is releasing a malware removal tool after a number of Mac systems were infected by computer hackers.

Microsoft hacked by same cyberattack as Apple and Facebook …

February 23 2013 | Technology

Microsoft has revealed it is the latest high-profile internet company to have its computer system hacked.

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Tom Phillips is the Telegraph’s Shanghai correspondent. He arrived in China in 2012, after seven years covering Brazil and Latin America for the Guardian.

Facebook hackers attack Apple

February 19 2013 | Technology

Apple computers were attacked by the same hackers who recently targeted Facebook, but no data appeared to have been stolen, the company said in an unprecedented admission of a widespread cyber-security breach.

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EADS, ThyssenKrupp Attacked by Chinese Hackers: Report

By REUTERS

Published: February 24, 2013 at 9:18 AM ET

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Airbus parent EADS and German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp recorded major attacks by Chinese hackers in 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported, citing unidentified people within the two companies.

That is a trend seen throughout the German economy, where companies are increasingly being attacked by Chinese hackers, the magazine said, citing information from the German government.

A spokesman for EADS told Reuters the attacks were “standard attacks” and the company was working closely with government authorities on the issue of cyber security.

ThyssenKrupp was not immediately available for comment when tried by Reuters. The Chinese embassy in Berlin and the German economy ministry were also not immediately available to comment.

When confronted with similar accusations in the past, China’s Defence Ministry has issued a flat denial and said hacking is a global problem and that China is one of world’s biggest victims of cyber assaults.

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution recorded almost 1,100 digital attacks from foreign secret services in 2012, mostly targeted on politicians involved with energy and finance, Der Spiegel said.

(Reporting by Peter Dinkloh, Tim Hepher and Alexandra Hudson; Editing by Mark Potter)

Wall Street Journal Reports Attack by China Hackers

A day after The Times reported that Chinese hackers had infiltrated its computers, The Wall Street Journal said it was coping with a similar …

January 31, 2013 – By NICOLE PERLROTH – Technology – Article – Print Headline: “Wall Street Journal Announces That It Was Hacked by the Chinese, Too”
Washington Post Joins List of News Media Hacked by the Chinese …

The Washington Post has joined The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg as news organizations hacked after writing …

February 1, 2013 – By NICOLE PERLROTH – Technology – Article – Print Headline: “Washington Post Joins List of Media Hacked by the Chinese”
Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

The timing of the attacks coincided with reporting for an investigation that found that the relatives of China’s prime minister had accumulated a …

January 30, 2013 – By NICOLE PERLROTH – Technology – Article – Print Headline: “Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months”
China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

5 days ago … An overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American companies and government agencies start in a building on the edge of Shanghai, say …

February 18, 2013 – By DAVID E. SANGER, DAVID BARBOZA and NICOLE PERLROTH – Technology – Article – Print Headline: “China’s Army Seen as Tied To Hacking Against U.S.”
Accusations of Chinese Hacking in Coke’s Failed Big Deal

5 days ago … A new report on Chinese hackers depicts a wide-ranging cyberwar campaign against many American targets. One of them apparently was the …

February 19, 2013 – By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED – Business Day
Daily Report: Chinese Army Unit Is Tied to Hacking Against U.S. …

5 days ago … An overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American companies and government agencies start in a building on the edge of Shanghai, …

February 19, 2013 – By THE NEW YORK TIMES – Technology
China’s Cybergames

4 days ago … On Tuesday, a new report from Mandiant, an American computer security firm, publicly documented an explicit link between Chinese hackers …

February 19, 2013 – The New York Times – Opinion – Article – Print Headline: “China’s Cybergames”
Daily Report: Hackers in China Attack The Times

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting …

January 31, 2013 – By THE NEW YORK TIMES – Technology
Some Victims of Online Hacking Edge Into the Light

3 days ago … In 2010, when Google alerted some users of Gmail — political activists, mostly — that it appeared Chinese hackers were trying to read their …

February 20, 2013 – By NICOLE PERLROTH – Technology – Article – Print Headline: “Hacking Victims Edge Into Light”
China Denies Allegations of Cyberattacks by Army

4 days ago … “Chinese military forces have never supported any hacking activities,” Mr. Geng said at the briefing. “The claim by the Mandiant company that …

February 20, 2013 – By DAVID BARBOZA – Business Day / Global Business – Article – Print Headline: “China Denies Allegations of Conducting Cyberwarfare”
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  February 21, 2013 – By THE NEW YORK TIMES – Technology
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  February 18, 2013 – NYT – Business Day – Multimedia – Print Headline: “Industries Targeted by the Hackers”
6. Heinz Trades Draw F.B.I. Scrutiny
  
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  February 20, 2013 – By WILLIAM ALDEN – Business Day
7. Bank of America Suffers Widespread Outages; Hacking Is Not …
  
  Breaking News Videos from CNN.com | Watch what happened when CNN tried to film the building at the center of Chinese hacking allegations.
  
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8. Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers
  
  Breaking News Videos from CNN.com | Watch what happened when CNN tried to film the building at the center of Chinese hacking allegations.
  
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9. Today’s Scuttlebot: Bush Hacking, and Online Gambling From New …
  
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  February 08, 2013 – By THE NEW YORK TIMES – Technology
10. Theater Listings for Feb. 1-7
  
  uses the conventions of Chinese opera to illuminate the story of two Chinese ….. China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US …
  
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  Today’s Scuttlebot: A Social Creative Network, and a Bit of Hacking …
  
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  February 05, 2013 – By THE NEW YORK TIMES – Technology
  
  Rise of Drones in U.S. Spurs Efforts to Limit Uses
  
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  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 14, 2013 – By CAROL VOGEL – Arts / Art & Design – Article – Print Headline: “Dispersing Steichens Across the Country”
  
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  Admitting to Security Breaches – Graphic
  
  being hacked seriously enough to compromise their computer networks. …Suspected Chinese attackers breached its systems too.
  
  February 20, 2013 – NYT – Business Day – Multimedia – Print Headline: “Admitting to Security Breaches”
  
  In Norway, TV Program on Firewood Elicits Passions
  
  4 days ago … Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
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  Apple Labor Audits Uncover Underage Workers
  
  The company employs 1.2 million workers across China. …consumers and investors should be told when companies have been hacked.
  
  January 25, 2013 – By REUTERS – Technology – Article – Print Headline: “Apple Labor Audits Uncover Underage Workers”
  
  Emissions Trade in E.U. Is Sputtering
  
  4 days ago … Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 20, 2013 – By STANLEY REED – Business Day / Energy & Environment – Article – Print Headline: “Emissions Trade in EU Is Sputtering”
  
  It’s Peak Season for a Matchmaker, but Do Not Call Her Yente
  
  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 10, 2013 – By CLYDE HABERMAN – N.Y. / Region – Article – Print Headline: “It’s Peak Season for a Matchmaker, but Do Not Call Her Yente”
  
  Sarah Losh and Alice Morse Earle, Antiquarians
  
  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 14, 2013 – By EVE M. KAHN – Arts / Art & Design – Article – Print Headline: “Sarah Losh and Alice Morse Earle, Antiquarians”
  
  ‘Here We Are,’ by Judith Malina, at the Living Theater
  
  China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. In Norway, TV Program on Firewood Elicits Passions. Show TunerBETA. Get suggested …
  
  January 30, 2013 – By CATHERINE RAMPELL – Theater / Theater Reviews – Article – Print Headline: “A Ticket to Love (and New Sandals, Too)”
  
  Adopted Boy’s Death in U.S. Stirs Outrage in Russia
  
  4 days ago … Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 19, 2013 – By ELLEN BARRY – World / Europe – Article – Print Headline: “After Adopted Boy Dies in U.S., Russian Officials Accuse Texas Woman”
  
  From Stay-at-Home Moms to Back-to-Work Lawyers
  
  6 days ago … Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 18, 2013 – By MICHAEL WINERIP – Booming – Article – Print Headline: “From Stay-at-Home Moms to Back-to-Work Lawyers”
  
  Shock Wave of Fireball Meteor Rattles Siberia, Injuring 1200
  
  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 15, 2013 – By ELLEN BARRY and ANDREW E. KRAMER – World / Europe – Article – Print Headline: “Meteor Explodes, Injuring Over 1,000 in Siberia”
  
  Afghan Withdrawal’s Main Hurdle – Getting Gear Out
  
  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 14, 2013 – By THOM SHANKER – World / Middle East – Article – Print Headline: “Main Hurdle in Afghan Withdrawal: Getting the Gear Out”
  
  Immersion Politics: Being Ann Richards
  
  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 10. ArtsBeat. Julian Fellowes Discusses a Season of Comings and Goings at …
  
  February 14, 2013 – By ADAM NAGOURNEY – Theater – Article – Print Headline: “Immersion Politics: Being Ann Richards”
  
  Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
  
  Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 4. DAVID BROOKS. What Data Can’t Do. 5. Obama Seeking to Boost Study of …
  
  February 15, 2013 – By SUSAN STELLIN – Real Estate – Article – Print Headline: “Reducing Your Carbon Footprint”
  
  Glass Slippers and Goody Two Shoes
  
  3 days ago … Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US. 10. ArtsBeat. Julian Fellowes Discusses a Season of Comings and Goings at …
  
  February 21, 2013 – By DAVE ITZKOFF – Theater – Article – Print Headline: “Glass Slippers and Goody Two Shoes”
  
  Apple Computers Hit by Sophisticated Cyberattack
  
  4 days ago … (In other words, unless you want to be owned by hackers, do not visit the …New York Times reported that one group of Chinese cyberattackers, …
  
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  Review Moves Detroit Nearer Emergency Oversight
  
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  Canon Forecast Falls Short of Expectations
  
  Canon officials said Wednesday that economic recovery in India and China, as well as …Some Victims of Online Hacking Edge Into the Light …
  
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  In Omaha Manhole Fire Photo, Logging Off in Search of Some Clues …
  
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  News Quiz | February 19, 2013
  
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  © 2013 The New York Times Company
  
  How Hackers Work
  
  by Jonathan Strickland
  
  Page
  
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  Computer Image Gallery
  
  Hackers from around the world gather at camps to practice their hobby and trade tips. See more computer pictures.
  
  Sean Gallup/Getty Images
  
  Related Links
  
  Is your computer secure?
  
  How Trojan Horses Work
  
  Could a single hacker crash a country’s network?
  
  Thanks to the media, the word “hacker” has gotten a bad reputation. The word summons up thoughts of malicious computer users finding new ways to harass people, defraud corporations, steal information and maybe even destroy the economy or start a war by infiltrating military computer systems. While there’s no denying that there are hackers out there with bad intentions, they make up only a small percentage of the hacker community.
  
  The term computer hacker first showed up in the mid-1960s. A hacker was a programmer — someone who hacked out computer code. Hackers were visionaries who could see new ways to use computers, creating programs that no one else could conceive. They were the pioneers of the computer industry, building everything from small applications to operating systems. In this sense, people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were all hackers — they saw the potential of what computers could do and created ways to achieve that potential.
  
  A unifying trait among these hackers was a strong sense of curiosity, sometimes bordering on obsession. These hackers prided themselves on not only their ability to create new programs, but also to learn how other programs and systems worked. When a program had a bug — a section of bad code that prevented the program from working properly — hackers would often create and distribute small sections of code called patches to fix the problem. Some managed to land a job that leveraged their skills, getting paid for what they’d happily do for free.
  
  As computers evolved, computer engineers began to network individual machines together into a system. Soon, the term hacker had a new meaning — a person using computers to explore a network to which he or she didn’t belong. Usually hackers didn’t have any malicious intent. They just wanted to know how computer networks worked and saw any barrier between them and that knowledge as a challenge.
  
  In fact, that’s still the case today. While there are plenty of stories about malicious hackers sabotaging computer systems, infiltrating networks and spreading computer viruses, most hackers are just curious — they want to know all the intricacies of the computer world. Some use their knowledge to help corporations and governments construct better security measures. Others might use their skills for more unethical endeavors.
  
  In this article, we’ll explore common techniques hackers use to infiltrate systems. We’ll examine hacker culture and the various kinds of hackers as well as learn about famous hackers, some of whom have run afoul of the law.
  
  In the next section, we’ll look at hackers’ tricks of the trade.
  
  Super Phreak
  
  Before computer hackers, curious and clever individuals found ways to manipulate the phone system in a phenomenon called phreaking. Through phreaking, these individuals found ways to make long distance calls for free or sometimes just played pranks on other telephone users.
  
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  © 1998-2013 HowStuffWorks, Inc
  
  …and I am Sid Harth@elcidharth.com

Time to tackle China: military unit 'behind prolific hacking'

neverbelieve — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:00:26 +0000

It’s been widely asserted that the Chinese goverment/military is behind a huge amount of economic theft and other electronic crime/threats to global security in recent times. Evidence continues to build and something must be done about it:

A secretive branch of China’s military is probably one of the world’s “most prolific cyber espionage groups”, a US cyber security firm has said.

Mandiant said Unit 61398 was believed to have “systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data” from at least 141 organisations around the world.

The White House said it has taken its concerns about cyber-theft to the highest levels of China’s government.

China has denied hacking and questioned Mandiant’s report.

“Hacking attacks are transnational and anonymous,” said foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei.

“Determining their origins are extremely difficult. We don’t know how the evidence in this so-called report can be tenable.

Mr Hong added that Beijing “firmly opposes hacking”, has taken steps to prevent it and is also a victim of cyber attacks.

In an indication of the military sensitivity around the Shanghai site pinpointed by the report as home to the hacking group, the BBC’s John Sudworth and his camera crew were briefly detained by soldiers when they went to film the facility. They were only released once they had handed over their footage.

via BBC News – China military unit ‘behind prolific hacking’.

This is just one of hundreds of reports that suggest part of Chinese governmental DNA is to steal, copy and emulate their way to an equal footing with Western firms/countries. Chinese advancements are to be applauded, but not where they are blatantly cheating.

The Chinese conventional military threat is growing rapidly, but it currently provides no tangible threat to Western interests at home with limited threat so far abroad. It is still something to think about now and carefully given its statements, stance and world history.

But cyber security is something that must be evolved swiftly today. Not just from protection of state, but protection of Western business interests and individuals’ personal information. Companies are losing money and intellectual property to the Chinese on a daily basis.

For those that talk about cyber attacks emanating from the US against Iran: one state attempting to disable a rogue state via non-violent means cannot be rationally compared to systematic theft of intellectual property from independent businesses by another country’s government machinery.

William Hague – who as Foreign Secretary oversees the work of Britain’s intelligence agencies, including the GCHQ listening post at Cheltenham – is said by Whitehall insiders to be incensed by China’s conduct, and has told Cabinet colleagues that Britain must make its displeasure known to Beijing, even if it means upsetting the lucrative trade ties between the countries.

via China’s cyber-war machine threatens us all – Telegraph.

China’s rise is beneficial to the world economy, but not if it refuses to play by the rules.

Fair play or be penalised – not too much to ask.

Thagavalfree | Chinese Military's 'Global Hacking HQ Found'

thagavalfree2012 — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:48:14 +0000

An unassuming 12-storey building in a suburb of Shanghai has been identified as the possible headquarters of a global hacking operation allegedly run by the Chinese military.

According to Mandiant, an American computer security company, extensive evidence collated over three years points to a white tower block in Datong Road, in the Pudong district of the city.

The building is reportedly the headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398.

Mandiant has spent several years working for a number of well-known multinational companies who all believe they have been victims of state-sponsored hacking.

Sky News understands that five UK firms described as ‘large companies – brand names’ have previously employed the services of Mandiant.

Using evidence passed to its analysts by the multinationals, Mandiant has deciphered codes, analysed IP addresses and conducted a series of reverse-engineering processes.

“The details we have analysed during hundreds of investigations convince us that the groups conducting these (hacking) activities are based primarily in China and that the Chinese Government is aware of them,” the report says.

Meanwhile, Jay Carney, a spokesman for the White House, said: “We have repeatedly raised our concerns at the highest levels about cyber theft with senior Chinese officials including in the military and we will continue to do so.”

He declined to comment specifically on the contents of the 74-page report, which contains remarkable detail of the hacking operations.

Mandiant has identified 20 separate hacking groups in China which it calls Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).

Its report – called Exposing one of China’s Cyber Espionage Units - focuses on just one, APT1, which is believed to operate from inside the Shanghai building.

“From our unique vantage point responding to victims, we tracked APT1 back to four large networks in Shanghai, two of which are allocated directly to the Pudong New Area,” the report says.

The company studied the area of Shanghai pinpointed by their analysis and discovered the Chinese military building.

Mandiant was not able physically to prove that the hackers were inside the building but is convinced that they could not be anywhere else.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398 or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighbourhood,” the Mandiant’s founder Kevin Mandia is quoted as saying.

Of significant concern is the suggestion that hackers originating in China, including the APT1 group, are far more prevalent and sophisticated than previously assumed.

Not only had groups linked to China stolen commercial property, but some had also infiltrated US state infrastructure companies giving them the ability, potentially, to manipulate critical infrastructure including power grids and water supplies.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied having anything to do with state-sponsored hacking.

In January, the New York Times disclosed that Chinese hackers with an alleged Chinese military “footprint” had stolen the corporate passwords of all its employees and gained access to the personal computers of 53 employees.

“Reaching such conclusions for no reason with uncertain evidence and no proof and saying that China participates in relevant online attacks is totally irresponsible,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said in response to that allegation.

The alleged New York Times hacking had apparently taken place at the same time as the newspaper ran a report which suggested that outgoing Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao’s family had accumulated at least $2.7 bn (£1.7bn) in “hidden riches”.

Mandiant believes the activity it has uncovered represents just a tiny part of a massive hacking operation in China.

It said: “Though our visibility of APT1′s activities is incomplete, we have analysed the group’s intrusions against nearly 150 victims over seven years.”

At Tuesday’s regular foreign ministry news conference, officials shed little light on the report.

“Hacking is an international problem,” Hong Lei told Sky News.

“It is neither professional nor responsible to make groundless accusations without evidence.”

When pushed on the fact that the report appears to provide plenty of evidence, the spokesman said: “I don’t know how this evidence in the report is tenable.”

He did not elaborate.

Source: news.sky.com

Read Original Article @ http://news.sky.com/story/1053970/chinese-militarys-global-hacking-hq-found

Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

aurelius77 — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:28:30 +0000

Headquarters building of PLA Unit 61398 On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dom

New York Times: Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

johnib — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:16:37 +0000

This 12-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai is the headquarters of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army. China’s defense ministry has denied that it is responsible for initiating digital attacks.

By David Sanger, David Barboza and Nicole Perlroth
The New Yor Times

On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence Estimate, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

Mandiant provided an advance copy of its report to The New York Times, saying it hoped to “bring visibility to the issues addressed in the report.” Times reporters then tested the conclusions with other experts, both inside and outside government, who have examined links between the hacking groups and the army (Mandiant was hired by The New York Times Company to investigate a sophisticated Chinese-origin attack on its news operations, but concluded it was not the work of Comment Crew, but another Chinese group. The firm is not currently working for the Times Company but it is in discussions about a business relationship.)

While Comment Crew has drained terabytes of data from companies like Coca-Cola, increasingly its focus is on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States — its electrical power grid, gas lines and waterworks. According to the security researchers, one target was a company with remote access to more than 60 percent of oil and gas pipelines in North America. The unit was also among those that attacked the computer security firm RSA, whose computer codes protect confidential corporate and government databases.

Contacted Monday, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington again insisted that their government does not engage in computer hacking, and that such activity is illegal. They describe China itself as a victim of computer hacking, and point out, accurately, that there are many hacking groups inside the United States. But in recent years the Chinese attacks have grown significantly, security researchers say. Mandiant has detected more than 140 Comment Crew intrusions since 2006. American intelligence agencies and private security firms that track many of the 20 or so other Chinese groups every day say those groups appear to be contractors with links to the unit.

And the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday that the allegations were ‘‘unprofessional.’’

‘‘Making unfounded accusations based on preliminary results is both irresponsible and unprofessional, and is not helpful for the resolution of the relevant problem,’’ said Hong Lei, a ministry spokesman. ‘‘China resolutely opposes hacking actions and has established relevant laws and regulations and taken strict law enforcement measures to defend against online hacking activities.’’

While the unit’s existence and operations are considered a Chinese state secret, Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that the Mandiant report was “completely consistent with the type of activity the Intelligence Committee has been seeing for some time.”

The White House said it was “aware” of the Mandiant report, and Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said, “We have repeatedly raised our concerns at the highest levels about cybertheft with senior Chinese officials, including in the military, and we will continue to do so.”

The United States government is planning to begin a more aggressive defense against Chinese hacking groups, starting on Tuesday. Under a directive signed by President Obama last week, the government plans to share with American Internet providers information it has gathered about the unique digital signatures of the largest of the groups, including Comment Crew and others emanating from near where Unit 61398 is based.

But the government warnings will not explicitly link those groups, or the giant computer servers they use, to the Chinese army. The question of whether to publicly name the unit and accuse it of widespread theft is the subject of ongoing debate.

“There are huge diplomatic sensitivities here,” said one intelligence official, with frustration in his voice.

But Obama administration officials say they are planning to tell China’s new leaders in coming weeks that the volume and sophistication of the attacks have become so intense that they threaten the fundamental relationship between Washington and Beijing.

The United States government also has cyberwarriors. Working with Israel, the United States has used malicious software called Stuxnet to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But government officials insist they operate under strict, if classified, rules that bar using offensive weapons for nonmilitary purposes or stealing corporate data.

The United States finds itself in something of an asymmetrical digital war with China. “In the cold war, we were focused every day on the nuclear command centers around Moscow,” one senior defense official said recently. “Today, it’s fair to say that we worry as much about the computer servers in Shanghai.”

A Shadowy Unit

Unit 61398 — formally, the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Staff Department’s 3rd Department — exists almost nowhere in official Chinese military descriptions. Yet intelligence analysts who have studied the group say it is the central element of Chinese computer espionage. The unit was described in 2011 as the “premier entity targeting the United States and Canada, most likely focusing on political, economic, and military-related intelligence” by the Project 2049 Institute, a nongovernmental organization in Virginia that studies security and policy issues in Asia.

While the Obama administration has never publicly discussed the Chinese unit’s activities, a secret State Department cable written the day before Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008 described at length American concerns about the group’s attacks on government sites. (At the time American intelligence agencies called the unit “Byzantine Candor,” a code word dropped after the cable was published by WikiLeaks.)

The Defense Department and the State Department were particular targets, the cable said, describing how the group’s intruders send e-mails, called “spearphishing” attacks, that placed malware on target computers once the recipient clicked on them. From there, they were inside the systems.

American officials say that a combination of diplomatic concerns and the desire to follow the unit’s activities have kept the government from going public. But Mandiant’s report is forcing the issue into public view.

For more than six years, Mandiant tracked the actions of Comment Crew, so named for the attackers’ penchant for embedding hidden code or comments into Web pages. Based on the digital crumbs the group left behind — its attackers have been known to use the same malware, Web domains, Internet protocol addresses, hacking tools and techniques across attacks — Mandiant followed 141 attacks by the group, which it called “A.P.T. 1” for Advanced Persistent Threat 1.

“But those are only the ones we could easily identify,” said Mr. Mandia. Other security experts estimate that the group is responsible for thousands of attacks.

As Mandiant mapped the Internet protocol addresses and other bits of digital evidence, it all led back to the edges of Pudong district of Shanghai, right around the Unit 61398 headquarters. The group’s report, along with 3,000 addresses and other indicators that can be used to identify the source of attacks, concludes “the totality of the evidence” leads to the conclusion that “A.P.T. 1 is Unit 61398.”

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.”

The most fascinating elements of the Mandiant report follow the keystroke-by-keystroke actions of several of the hackers who the firm believes work for the P.L.A. Mandiant tracked their activities from inside the computer systems of American companies they were invading. The companies had given Mandiant investigators full access to rid them of the Chinese spies.

One of the most visible hackers it followed is UglyGorilla, who first appeared on a Chinese military forum in January 2004, asking whether China has a “similar force” to the “cyber army” being set up by the American military.

By 2007 UglyGorilla was turning out a suite of malware with what the report called a “clearly identifiable signature.” Another hacker, called “DOTA” by Mandiant, created e-mail accounts that were used to plant malware. That hacker was tracked frequently using a password that appeared to be based on his military unit’s designation. DOTA and UglyGorilla both used the same I.P. addresses linked back to Unit 61398’s neighborhood.

Mandiant discovered several cases in which attackers logged into their Facebook and Twitter accounts to get around China’s firewall that blocks ordinary citizen’s access, making it easier to track down their real identities.

Mandiant also discovered an internal China Telecom memo discussing the state-owned telecom company’s decision to install high-speed fiber-optic lines for Unit 61398’s headquarters.

China’s defense ministry has denied that it is responsible for initiating attacks. “It is unprofessional and groundless to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without any conclusive evidence,” it said last month, one of the statements that prompted Mandiant to make public its evidence.

Escalating Attacks

Mandiant believes Unit 61398 conducted sporadic attacks on American corporate and government computer networks; the earliest it found was in 2006. Two years ago the numbers spiked. Mandiant discovered some of the intrusions were long-running. On average the group would stay inside a network, stealing data and passwords, for a year; in one case it had access for four years and 10 months.

Mandiant has watched the group as it has stolen technology blueprints, manufacturing processes, clinical trial results, pricing documents, negotiation strategies and other proprietary information from more than 100 of its clients, mostly in the United States. Mandiant identified attacks on 20 industries, from military contractors to chemical plants, mining companies and satellite and telecommunications corporations.

Mandiant’s report does not name the victims, who usually insist on anonymity. A 2009 attack on Coca-Cola coincided with the beverage giant’s failed attempt to acquire the China Huiyuan Juice Group for $2.4 billion, according to people with knowledge of the results of the company’s investigation.

As Coca-Cola executives were negotiating what would have been the largest foreign purchase of a Chinese company, Comment Crew was busy rummaging through their computers in an apparent effort to learn more about Coca-Cola’s negotiation strategy.

The attack on Coca-Cola began, like hundreds before it, with a seemingly innocuous e-mail to an executive that was, in fact, a spearphishing attack. When the executive clicked on a malicious link in the e-mail, it gave the attackers a foothold inside Coca-Cola’s network. From inside, they sent confidential company files through a maze of computers back to Shanghai, on a weekly basis, unnoticed.

Two years later, Comment Crew was one of at least three Chinese-based groups to mount a similar attack on RSA, the computer security company owned by EMC, a large technology company. It is best known for its SecurID token, carried by employees at United States intelligence agencies, military contractors and many major companies. (The New York Times also uses the firm’s tokens to allow access to its e-mail and production systems remotely.) RSA has offered to replace SecurID tokens for customers and said it had added new layers of security to its products.

As in the Coca-Cola case, the attack began with a targeted, cleverly fashioned poisoned e-mail to an RSA employee. Two months later, hackers breached Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, partly by using the information they gleaned from the RSA attack.

Mandiant is not the only private firm tracking Comment Crew. In 2011, Joe Stewart, a Dell SecureWorks researcher, was analyzing malware used in the RSA attack when he discovered that the attackers had used a hacker tool to mask their true location.

When he reverse-engineered the tool, he found that the vast majority of stolen data had been transferred to the same range of I.P. addresses that Mandiant later identified in Shanghai.

Dell SecureWorks says it believed Comment Crew includes the same group of attackers behind Operation Shady RAT, an extensive computer espionage campaign uncovered in 2011 in which more than 70 organizations over a five-year period, including the United Nations, government agencies in the United States, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam were targeted.

Infrastructure at Risk

What most worries American investigators is that the latest set of attacks believed coming from Unit 61398 focus not just on stealing information, but obtaining the ability to manipulate American critical infrastructure: the power grids and other utilities.

Staff at Digital Bond, a small security firm that specializes in those industrial-control computers, said that last June Comment Crew unsuccessfully attacked it. A part-time employee at Digital Bond received an e-mail that appeared to come from his boss, Dale Peterson. The e-mail, in perfect English, discussed security weaknesses in critical infrastructure systems, and asked the employee to click a link to a document for more information. Mr. Peterson caught the e-mail and shared it with other researchers, who found the link contained a remote-access tool that would have given the attackers control over the employee’s computer and potentially given them a front-row seat to confidential information about Digital Bond’s clients, which include a major water project, a power plant and a mining company.

Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault, analyzed the computer servers used in the attack, which led him to other victims, including the Chertoff Group. That firm, headed by the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, has run simulations of an extensive digital attack on the United States. Other attacks were made on a contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, a lobbying group that represents companies that make components for power grids. Those organizations confirmed they were attacked but have said they prevented attackers from gaining access to their network.

Mr. Blasco said that, based on the forensics, all the victims had been hit by Comment Crew. But the most troubling attack to date, security experts say, was a successful invasion of the Canadian arm of Telvent. The company, now owned by Schneider Electric, designs software that gives oil and gas pipeline companies and power grid operators remote access to valves, switches and security systems.

Telvent keeps detailed blueprints on more than half of all the oil and gas pipelines in North and South America, and has access to their systems. In September, Telvent Canada told customers that attackers had broken into its systems and taken project files. That access was immediately cut, so that the intruders could not take command of the systems.

Martin Hanna, a Schneider Electric spokesman, did not return requests for comment, but security researchers who studied the malware used in the attack, including Mr. Stewart at Dell SecureWorks and Mr. Blasco at AlienVault, confirmed that the perpetrators were the Comment Crew.

“This is terrifying because — forget about the country — if someone hired me and told me they wanted to have the offensive capability to take out as many critical systems as possible, I would be going after the vendors and do things like what happened to Telvent,“ Mr. Peterson of Digital Bond said. “It’s the holy grail.”

Mr. Obama alluded to this concern in the State of the Union speech, without mentioning China or any other nation. “We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets,” he said. “Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air-traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing.”

Mr. Obama faces a vexing choice: In a sprawling, vital relationship with China, is it worth a major confrontation between the world’s largest and second largest economy over computer hacking?

A few years ago, administration officials say, the theft of intellectual property was an annoyance, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars of revenue. But clearly something has changed. The mounting evidence of state sponsorship, the increasing boldness of Unit 61398, and the growing threat to American infrastructure are leading officials to conclude that a far stronger response is necessary.

“Right now there is no incentive for the Chinese to stop doing this,” said Mr. Rogers, the House intelligence chairman. “If we don’t create a high price, it’s only going to keep accelerating.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein Statement on Chinese Military Hacking of American Targets

johnib — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:09:06 +0000

Washington—Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today issued the following statement on a report by computer security company Mandiant (described in today’s New York Times) that outlines the concerted and comprehensive hacking of American targets by the Chinese military:

New York Times: Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

“This is a sobering public report on the lengths to which the Chinese military has gone to infiltrate and hack American companies and clearly demonstrates the need to pass cyber security legislation as soon as possible.

“Beyond untold millions of dollars in economic losses, the latest attacks the report attributes to ‘Unit 61398’ does not focus on obtaining information ‘but obtaining the ability to manipulate American critical infrastructure: the power grids and other utilities.’

“Multiple American sources have raised the issue of cyber attacks with Chinese interlocutors—all to no avail. In fact, there has been complete denial among the Chinese that this is occurring. I have personally raised cyber attacks with Chinese officials as recently as last week. Again, complete denial.

“This report reinforces the need for a binding international agreement among nations to prohibit cyber crimes and attacks with a workable enforcement mechanism. There are already international agreements in place to govern criminal activity and war. Cyber attacks are both, but there is nothing currently in place to govern this emerging and increasingly dangerous national and economic security threat.

“In my view, the time has come for an international cyber agreement and for strong legislation that can improve information sharing and protect the critical infrastructure of this country. Absent that, the United States remains especially vulnerable to a potential catastrophic cyber attack.”

New York Times: Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

Hacking against the US is traced to the front door of a Chinese army unit

Zachary M. Seward — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 05:03:35 +0000

This building on the outskirts of Shanghai is the home of Unit 61398 of the Chinese military, which is responsible for the preponderance of digital espionage against American companies and the US government, according to a report just released by the computer security firm Mandiant.

The specificity of the report—and its treatment in a lengthy front-page article in the New York Times—is likely to inflame discussion of the threat posed to multinational corporations by state-sponsored hackers in China. Mandiant said Unit 61398, sometimes known in the US as “Comment Crew,” was responsible for attacks on at least 141 companies. Previous reports have identified Coca-Cola, Halliburton, and the European Union as among the victims of Comment Crew.

Here is another image from the Mandiant report identifying the location of Unit 61398 on Datong Road in Shanghai:

Mandiant said the building was built in 2007 and contains 130,663 square feet over 12 floors. “China Telecom provided special fiber optic communications infrastructure for the unit in the name of national defense,” the report notes.

The hackers of Unit 61398 use elaborate ruses to infiltrate computers that sit behind corporate and government networks, then maintain access for an average of 356 days, downloading files ranging from emails to contracts. Mandiant released a video of what it said it was an actual hacker in Unit 61398, nicknamed “DOTA,” engaging in cyber espionage:

The Chinese government denies any involvement in computer hacking and says any such activity emanating from China is the work of rogue hackers not sponsored by the state. But plenty of reports, including this latest one, have suggested otherwise. Here’s a map of victims of hacking by Unit 61398, which Mandiant refers to as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 1:

The Mandiant report doesn’t identify any victims by name, though others have in the past, but says the hacking of companies has spanned 20 major industries. (The Times reports that Unit 61398 wasn’t responsible for recent hacking of the newspaper’s servers.) This timeline gives a sense of where the hackers have seemed to focus their interest at various times:

The report, which is available as PDF here, also details the techniques and infrastructure of Unit 61398 in an attempt to aid defenses against the attacks—and, of course, to market Mandiant’s services for the same.

New Sinocentrism: The ideology that may be driving China to hack foreign media

johnib — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 09:14:52 +0000

(Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Posted by Max Fisher on February 1, 2013

We don’t know for sure whether or not the Chinese government was behind the four-month-long campaign of China-based cyber attacks on the New York Times. For what it’s worth, a specialist in Chinese hacking at the Council on Foreign Relations named Adam Segal explains here why analysts tend to suspect Beijing’s hand in the sophisticated and “depressingly ordinary” Chinese hacks on Western targets from newspapers to defense contractors. There are the breadcrumb trails back to facilities associated with the Chinese military, for example, and the hackers’ deep interest in topics that would only seem important to senior Communist Party officials, such as the reputations of the Dalai Lama and of party officials themselves.

But there’s another question about the Chinese hackers and their long-suspected links to the Chinese government: Why would Beijing think this is okay to do? How could Chinese Communist Party leaders square their goal of becoming a respected global power with behavior – possibly hacking a Western media organization in response to an embarrassing story – that seems more in line with that of a defensive pariah state?

The answer, or at least a very compelling theory, may be contained in a fascinating blog post by Christopher Ford of the Hudson Institute. Ford, a China expert, attended a Beijing conference with international analysts and Chinese military leaders in November. He was at first frustrated by his Chinese counterparts’ insistence on scolding and lecturing foreign participants. At one point, presumably at his wits’ end, Ford stood up and pointed out that Chinese officials often complain that the U.S. tells other countries “how to run their internal affairs.” So why, he asked, did he hear no Americans telling China what to do at the conference, and yet there were Chinese generals publicly insisting, before news cameras, that Japan must immediately expel its right-wing political parties and rewrite its history textbooks to better reflect China’s view of World War Two? Was this not exactly the sort of “internal interference” of which China claims to be a victim?

A “well-known” general with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) answered. He said, according to Ford’s paraphrases, that it’s “not ‘interference’ in another state’s ‘internal affairs’ for Beijing to make demands about how other states view and depict China and their own history in the Asia-Pacific region, because these things affect China.” In other words, the perception of China abroad, he argued, is such a central national interest for China that it is within Beijing’s prerogative to change it, even in other countries.

This is when things seemed to click together for Ford and he began to see a possible overarching ideology that would help explain not just the Chinese Communist Party’s extreme sensitivity to its perceptions abroad, but its willingness to act internationally – and sometimes aggressively – to control those perceptions.

If this view is indeed broadly held in contemporary China – and I have no reason to believe that senior serving PLA officers, in uniform, attending a conference that they have themselves sponsored and speaking at a plenary session to which they invited Chinese media representatives with television cameras, would depart in any meaningful way from the official PRC line – it may provide an important insight into Chinese conceptions of how Beijing’s imagined “harmonious world” would work. It suggests that there is nothing at all anomalous about a range of otherwise seemingly idiosyncratic PRC demands in recent years, including calls for Western governments to prohibit “biased” coverage of the PRC in domestic Western media, the insistence that a small town in Oregon destroy a privately-painted wall mural sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan and Taiwanese independence, Beijing’s angry complaints every time anyone has any dealings with the Dalai Lama or gives a prize to a Chinese whose political views are not approved by PRC authorities, its indignant reaction to the “lack of balance” in a recent publication from the Australian National University, its harassment of Western media organizations that tell their readers about corruption in the Chinese elite, and the above-listed agenda related to Japanese domestic politics and administration.

You might add one important trend to Ford’s list of Chinese actions or demands, often reaching well beyond its borders, to control how the country is perceived abroad. That, of course, would be the possibility that it is behind cyber attacks on Western news organizations that report embarrassing stories about its senior leaders. After all, Chinese censors working within the country are extremely aggressive and organized in shaping conversation about the Communist Party leadership, something the party clearly considers a top priority. Why wouldn’t it extend this same priority abroad?

Ford connects this tendency back to China’s long-established Sinocentrism; its national view of itself as the very center. Zhongguo, the Chinese name for China, famously means “Middle Kingdom.” And for most of its history, China was the center of its own universe. But that Sinocentric thinking may still carry through today, a sort of “New Sinocentrism.” (Ford, to his credit, has a more precise name for it: “Sinocentrism in the information age.”) He explains, compellingly, how this might be applied to understand much of what can make China’s behavior baffling to outsiders:

Beijing’s various idiosyncrasies in these regards may be, in meaningful part, the relatively coherent and consistent outgrowths of a conceptual framework – an Information Age twist, if you will, on much older themes of Sinocentric moralism – in which the emerging Chinese superpower hungers to control other peoples’ narrative of China. Even things like overseas media coverage, university publications, and small town murals thousands of miles away are all deemed appropriate subjects for [People's Republic of China] demands because they relate in some fashion to China, which is assumed to have a proprietary interest not only in how the rest of the world acts toward China, but also in how it depicts and understands China.

China’s fixation upon shaping others’ accounts of China, then, is arguably not necessarily “just” the result of insecurity or narcissism. Some of it may in fact grow out of a deeply-rooted conception of social order in which narrative control is inherently a strategic objective because it is assumed that status or role ascriptions and moral characterizations play a critical role in shaping the world they describe.

In this thinking, China’s hacking of foreign news organizations – like, for example, its demands that foreign governments not call attention to Chinese pollution or human rights abuses – is not just about protecting the Communist Party’s reputation within China. This is what I, like others, have long assumed: that the party is worried about any information or dissent that might fuel unrest. Ford isn’t disputing that, but rather suggesting that there may be another layer of thinking, one in which the Party is legitimately concerned with protecting how China is discussed outside of China as well. He calls it “a sort of conceptual imperialism, at least in aspiration, suggesting that it is a Chinese strategic objective to control the world’s discourse about China.”

A theory of this sort is, of course, both too large and sweeping to really test in isolation and too complex to fully “explain” a single incident, such as the recent cyber attacks on Western news organizations. Still, it is an interesting window into one possible ideological element of the Communist Party’s thinking and a reminder of just how differently the world looks from Beijing than it does from just about anywhere else.

(Credit for flagging Robert Ford’s post goes to Adam Minter, a Shanghai-based journalist, and Bill Bishop, who featured this on his great, reader-supported e-mail newsletter on all things China.)

Matt's Favorites: Thursday's LTU Event On Tape, Super Bowl Tech, More Chinese Hacking

Matt Roush — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 03:13:13 +0000

What’s the latest from the wonderful world of high tech? Try these bons mots on for size…

* First of all, thanks to everybody who showed up for Thursday morning’s Last Thursdays Unwired @ Lawrence Technological University session on IT security. If you missed it, the event audio is available at my podcast page on CBSDetroit.com.

* A look at Twitter’s six-second video app, Vine.

* And here’s a selection of Super Bowl hashtags and apps.

* And here are 22 creative Super Bowl car commercials.

* The Obama administration is considering more assertive action against Beijing to combat a persistent cyber-espionage campaign it believes Chinese hackers are waging against U.S. companies and government agencies.

* The Wall Street Journal said the Chinese hacked it, too, after it ran critical coverage of a Chinese government official.

* A look at the Shuttle Columbia’s doomed mission, which ended 10 years ago today, and why the crew was never told of possible damage to the heat shield.

* More charmingly, here’s a cartoon on the life of a real-life astronaut.

* And in happier NASA news, a major new communication satellite in launched.

* And an asteroid half the size of a football field will buzz the earth inside the orbits of geosynchronous satellites on Feb. 15. Even if it hit, the impact of a 50-yard stone asteroid wouldn’t be cataclysmic — unless you were within maybe 15 or 20 miles of it.

* Submitted without comment: The International CES electronics show ditches CNet’s News.com as the Official Arbiter Of What’s Coolest At CES after CNet’s treatment of a gizmo that allows TV time-shifters to skip commercials.

* Speaking of disrguntlement, a former employee lets loose on the UK’s HMV on the company’s Twitter feed.

* It turns out elite athlete’s edge is as much in their minds as in their bodies — their brains excel at motion tracking.

* Twitter had another outage Thursday morning. And so did Amazon.com, Thursday afternoon.

* Imagine stumbling upon stinky whale barf on the beach. Well, not so bad if it’s worth $68,000, like this piece of stinky whale barf was.

* BlackBerry shares slide as its new devices face an uphill battle.

* A lawsuit filed on Thursday alleges Microsoft Corp. has been infringing patents that allow Internet search engines to most effectively place advertisements.

* Here’s a look at Silicon Valley before the tech industry, its early days.

* Google is reportedly giving the EU an antitrust probe settlement offer.

China and neighbours: the next global power struggle

neverbelieve — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:40:31 +0000

The Middle East is a constant cause for concern, especially regarding energy security and general stability of the region. But there have been several posts here suggesting that China and the surrounding region is really the potentially problematic one on a truly global scale. They mainly focussed on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island dispute between the PRC, ROC and Japan.

But it’s worth remembering the South China Sea dispute is still going on and China keeps ratcheting up the pressure in both disputes, such as this:

For months, Chinese patrol boats and other craft have scuffled with foreign vessels, mainly from the Philippines and most often over contested fishing grounds. But an assertion from officials in Hainan that they can stop and board any vessel passing through these waters is something quite different. The US Navy has had a lot of different missions over the centuries, but one of its elemental purposes has been defending freedom-of-navigation on the high seas. The Seventh Fleet is the regnant military power in this area. I am usually in the “oh calm down” camp about frictions, especially military, between China and America. But it is easy to imagine things becoming dangerous, quickly, if the new Chinese administration actually tries to carry out this order.

via The Next Global Hotspot to Worry About – James Fallows – The Atlantic.

Of course the suggestion that an insignificant Chinese patrol boat could even attempt to stop a US military vessel is rather unrealistic (~~or even operate over such a wide area?~~). But this article raises an important point: China’s approach is far from the ‘peaceful rise’ it promised and more often than not relies on aggressive statements internally to justify itself to the population.

The danger is, as China’s power continues to grow, this domestic dialogue will be taken with more global significance. Perhaps more than intended: it’s difficult to be sure exactly how hardline the Chinese government wish to be abroad and how much is simply angry rhetoric for the home audience and that’s a key part of the concern that other nations have.

The day has yet to come where the Chinese leadership need a show of outward force, but rapid military expansion doesn’t do anything to soothe these fears.

We also largely wrote off (rightly or wrongly) the game-changing capability of China’s new carrier.

But the threat of cyber attacks was also touched upon and these are becoming increasingly frequent.

One recent example of a wider problem faced from the ‘Comment group’ and others based out of China and arguably inextricably linked to the Chinese government is the following:

For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software Inc., Milburn’s family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company’s parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national Internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a $2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April.

In between, the hackers assailed Solid Oak’s computer systems, shutting down web and e-mail servers, spying on an employee with her webcam, and gaining access to sensitive files in a battle that caused company revenues to tumble and brought it within a hair’s breadth of collapse.

via China Mafia-Style Hack Attack Drives California Firm to Brink – Bloomberg.

Certainly the next power struggle is more between China and its neighbours than China and the USA, especially any conventional military challenge.

However, the issue of cyber security is current and real. Where military expansion concerns are largely confined to Asia/Pacific for now, attacks on economic and political targets from China equally impact on European companies and governments as well.

Europe and (to a lesser extent) the US are too wrapped up in internal self-inflicted economic problems to look too far abroad and when they do, the Middle East is closer.

While it is saddening that China’s rise has more represented a growing threat rather than a flourishing partner, it is something that cannot be ignored.

Cyber Blitz

aurelius77 — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:07:11 +0000

A recent series of cyber attacks on Japanese Internet sites originated in China and were viewed as a

IMO, China's welcome to lead the world in some things...

Eric Olson's Blog — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:35:32 +0000

A week or so ago, I noted, via an awesome slide from Bit9 Security, that Chinese hackers are just workin’ stiffs like the rest of us. Then I had a quick piece that even here in the West we see increasing indications they face some of the same concerns we do with regard to the trouble of keeping information bottled up. (This was further emphasized today by the stories, backed by pretty strong evidence, claiming that a hacker going by “Hardcore Charlie” has penetrated China Electronics Import & Export Corporation or “CEIEC”, China North Industries Corporation, WanBao Mining, and others.)

Well, today, (OK it was actually Friday, but apparently I forgot to hit “Publish” before I sat down to dinner on Friday) another in the trickle of “China has now surpassed the US” stories, and this one they’re welcome to.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group reported today that China’s Taobao.com e-commerce site “Surpasses PayPal as the World’s Most Phished Brand“. Seems not even the (I should say alleged) world leaders in the theft of sensitive information are immune to the even the simplest forms of stealing sensitive data. This includes both intentional dOxxing like Hardcore Charlie, and the inadvertent revelations that simply can’t be stopped in world full of camera phones and Twitter (and Weibo) accounts. (See the TV documentary that caught Chinese army personnel using click-to-play Cyber attack tools in the background as a fun example.)

Being trained in macroeconomics and generally favoring the Darwinian benefits of competition, I have to say this is one crown I’m happy to hand over.

Thanks again to the APWG for some very useful stats and reporting in today’s release. Full report is at:

http://apwg.org/reports/APWG_GlobalPhishingSurvey_2H2011.pdf

Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are mine alone, and do not represent the views, policies or positions of Cyveillance, Inc. or its parent, QinetiQ-North America. I speak here only for myself and no postings made on this blog should be interpreted as communications by, for or on behalf of, Cyveillance (though I may occasionally plug the extremely cool work we do and the fascinating, if occasionally frightening, research we openly publish.)

CYBERSECURITY VS. CYBERVAMPIRES: THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS

EWRoss — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:40:12 +0000

“There are two types of companies left in America; those that have been hacked and know it, and those that have been hacked and don’t know it.” (Read the full column at EWRoss.com)

Well it's nice to know our adversaries are just workin' stiffs like the rest of us.

Eric Olson's Blog — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:32:59 +0000

I happened across this in a deck from Bit9 Security from this week’s TechSecurity Conference, and just thought this was too good not to share. It’s a timeline pattern for attacks they guys at Bit9 see/detect. I think it pretty much speaks for itself. Awesome.

Source: http://dataconnectors.com/events/2012/pres/Bit9_030212.ppsx

(The deck’s a good read by the way. Well OK it’s a good read if you’re the type of nerd who’s into this stuff.)

Lack of Internal Processes 'Choked' Nortel Networks Ability to Prevent Decades of Hacking

Seaton Daly — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:01:07 +0000

A report by The Wall Street Journal today highlights the lack of attention corporate executives at the telecom device-maker, Nortel Networks, paid towards internal controls after it was discovered that, for over a decade, their corporate infrastructure had been illegally infiltrated by foreign agents. As early as 2000, hackers apparently obtained the passwords of seven top officials from China-based Internet addresses. The hackers had almost carte blanche access to the company’s entire internal network, and had created a reliable “back door” which allowed them to come and go as they pleased.

Our own internal process choked us all the time[.]” – Mr. Brian Shields, Internal Investigator, Nortel Networks.

The hacking was discovered in 2004, and exposed proprietary data such as client lists, acquisition plans, and monitoring of employee emails. Nortel Networks is now bankrupt, but in an internal investigation, it was determined that Nortel made no effort to determine if its products were compromised by the hacking incidents, and that it did not fix the problem, or disclose the hack, before it started to sell its assets to prospective buyers. According to The Wall Street Journal, it is possible that may of the companies who purchased Nortel assets inherited spyware or hacker infiltrations via the acquisitions.

People who looked at [the hacking] did not believe it was a real issue. This never came up like, ‘We have a real issue and we need to disclose to potential buyers of businesses.’” – Mr. Mike Zafirovski, former CEO, Nortel Networks.

As a publicly traded company, Nortel Networks is required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose “material” risks and events to investors. In a blog post last year, I commented on the guidance memo by the SEC which detailed the fact that cyber-attacks are not considered to be “material” under the applicable law. Such nondisclosure by a publicly traded company highlights the uncertainty in reporting requirements for corporate executives who discover that they have been infiltrated via a cyber-attack. However, it is up to the acquiring company to ask if the selling company has ever been hacked. If such is the case, and spyware has been loaded onto assets that were sold off as a result of Nortel’s bankruptcy plans, the acquiring company could be sued by its shareholders for lack of due diligence.

As is the case with most businesses, Nortel’s focus was on selling off assets in bankruptcy, and not to assess possible hacker damage as a result of the breach.

Major developments in IT secctor this week (1-8-11 to 6-8-11)

Ram — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:37:38 +0000

IS GOOGLE+ BETTER THAN FB?

SAN FRANSISCO: With its new social network, Google+ Inc has scored a huge blow against its archenemy.

Yes, Google+ delivers features and functionality that Microsoft Corp’s Bing search engine can’t touch.

Wrong archenemy, you say? Google+ is supposed to be a Facebook-killer? Ehhh, not so much.

At least not now. While Google+ brings some welcome new features to the social-networking space, there’s no great innovation that would make you want to use it as your primary online identity, or that Facebook couldn’t emulate if it chose to.

Google+, which launched about a month ago, is officially a beta, or test, service; to join, you need an invitation from someone who’s already a user. Judging from the evidence, invites aren’t very hard to come by: Less than three weeks after launch, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page announced that the service had already signed up 10 million members.

That sounds like a lot, and it is. But considering that Facebook is up around three-quarters of a billion, Google+ has a long way to go before your friends are as likely to be hanging out there as they are on the competition.

Instantly familiar
The core of Google+ will be familiar to Facebook loyalists. Users can post items that friends can comment on, just like Facebook’s Wall. There’s also what Google calls the Stream, a flow of items posted by others — essentially, Facebook’s News feature. On Facebook, if you see a post you like, you can “Like” it; on Google+, you can “+1″ it.

And it isn’t just Facebook that Google+ borrows from. In addition to people you know, you also have the ability to latch on to those you don’t, as on Twitter, and add their posts to your Stream.

The Google+ system for managing all this is its most interesting feature: Circles. They’re an easy and logical way for you to organize the people in your network and decide whose stuff you want to see, and who you want to see your stuff. In some ways, it isn’t all that different from Facebook’s “Friend Lists,” but Google+ makes Circles far simpler to establish and manage.

Moving in circles
You start off with four pre-configured circles, labeled Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. You also have the ability to easily create and name additional circles.

People in your address book, or potential contacts that Google suggests, are represented by small rectangular tiles with their profile pictures. All you do is drag and drop a tile into one or more of your circles. Those you add are notified that you’ve put them in a circle, but not told which one. So they’ll have no idea if they’re in People I Idolize or Former Co-Workers I Never Want to See Again.

When you post something, or upload photos, you decide which of your circles you want to share with. Those embarrassing party photos? Let’s keep ‘em away from the professional circle.

On the other hand, if you want a wider audience, you can make a post visible to “extended circles” — people in the circles of people in your circles — or to the general public.

Working both ways
Circles works both ways: You can filter your Stream to see only posts from your family, for example, or only those from professional colleagues.

It all serves to make your online connections different, and more nuanced, in Google+ than in Facebook. The latter is largely a reciprocal relationship, where both sides have to agree before you become friends. In Google+, it’s more like two separate relationships, mine with you and yours with me, that may or may not be parallel, since I may choose to share less with you than you do with me.

On the other hand, Google+ affords opportunities for other types of interaction. One is the ability to start a Hangout, which is a multiparticipant video chat room to which you can invite others. It’s a neat idea that requires you to know folks who want to participate — which, until there are many more users on the system, may be in short supply.

Tying things together
One unexpected result of using Google+ was that I found myself much more likely to use other parts of the Google ecosystem. Things like Gmail and the Picasa photo-sharing site, which have been around longer than Google+, felt less like disparate products and more like features of a unified, personal service.

Google describes its new network as a “project,” and I encountered a number of issues that made clear this is very much a work in progress. For example, I was unable to install the hangouts feature on a Mac using Apple Inc’s Safari web browser; I finally got it working in Google’s Chrome browser.

Until the bugs are worked out and the service is opened to all comers, we have no way of knowing whether people really want or need another social network — and if so, whether this one’s features are compelling enough to attract them.

For Google, the best-case scenario is that the service proves so flexible and easy to use that it creates a network effect, where more and more people join because so many of their friends are already on it.

HACKING RACKET DISCOVERED

OSTON: Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one “state actor” behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of the UN Secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there unnoticed for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.

“Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,” McAfee’s vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report released on Wednesday.

“What is happening to all this data … is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat.”

McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this year, when its researchers discovered logs of the attacks while reviewing the contents of a “command and control” server that they had discovered in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense companies.

It dubbed the attacks “Operation Shady RAT” and said the earliest breaches date back to mid-2006, though there might have been other intrusions as yet undetected. (RAT stands for “remote access tool,” a type of software that hackers and security experts use to access computer networks from afar).

Some of the attacks lasted just a month, but the longest — on the Olympic Committee of an unidentified Asian nation — went on and off for 28 months, according to McAfee.

“Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to unscrupulous competitors,” Alperovitch said.

“This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history,” he said. “The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening.”

China connection?
He said that McAfee had notified all the 72 victims of the attacks, which are under investigation by law enforcement agencies around the world. He declined to give more details, such as the names of the companies hacked.

Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was briefed on the discovery by McAfee. He said it was very likely that China was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would be of particular interest to Beijing.

The systems of the IOC and several national Olympic Committees were breached in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Games, for example.

And China views Taiwan as a renegade province, and political issues between them remain contentious even as economic ties have strengthened in recent years.

“Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia,” Lewis said.

He added that the US and Britain have capabilities to pull off this kind of campaign, but said, “We wouldn’t spy on ourselves and the Brits wouldn’t spy on us.”

McAfee, which was acquired by Intel Corp this year, would not comment on whether China was responsible. Security researchers who work for large corporations are often reluctant to link governments to cyber attacks out of fear it could hurt their business in those countries.

Hackers conference
The UN said it was aware of the report, and that it has started an investigation to ascertain if there was an intrusion.

“The idea is to look into the entire Geneva network,” said Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, adding that it was difficult to quantify the potential damage without knowing exactly what had been attacked.

He declined to be drawn on who might be behind the attacks. When asked what would happen if it turned out to be China, he said: “We’ll have to cross that bridge once we find out what happened to our network.”

McAfee released the report to coincide with the start of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, an annual gathering of security professionals and hackers who use their skills to promote security and fight cyber crime.

In the scorching desert heat, they will meet to talk about a series of recent headline-grabbing hacks, such as on Lockheed Martin Corp, the International Monetary Fund, Citigroup Inc, Sony Corp and EMC Corp’s RSA Security.

Experts will disclose security vulnerabilities in commonly used software, computers, services and electronics to help companies and governments combat criminal hackers.

The activist groups Anonymous and Lulz Security have recently grabbed the spotlight for temporarily shutting down some high-profile websites and defacing others.

But attacks like Operation Shady RAT are far more costly and often undisclosed, as victims fear reputational damage or attention from other hackers. McAfee sees Operation Shady RAT as the tip of the iceberg.

“I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact,” Alperovitch wrote in the report.

“In fact, I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.”

It is time for India?

LONDON: A minister in the David Cameron government has sparked a row by suggesting that Newcastle-based call centre workers who have lost their jobs should relocate to Mumbai.

Rail minister Theresa Villiers appears to tell sacked call-centre workers in Newcastle to relocate to Mumbai in a letter written to Berwick MP Sir Alan Beith.

The opposition Labour party and the unions have described the prospect of staff from north-east England being asked to move 5,000 miles to do the same job in India as “unhinged and unpatriotic”.

The row follows the closure of Baron House, a former East Coast passenger call centre, which resulted in the loss of nearly 200 jobs and delivered a major blow to the region’s struggling economy, The Independent reported today.

A review of public contracts by the newly-nationalised rail operator meant the existing provider, National Express, missed out to two other companies, one of which, Intelenet ( UK) has operations in Plymouth and Mumbai.

A third of those jobs have now been reportedly exported to India while the rest have been divided between centres in Wolverhampton and Devon.

Villiers sought to reassure Beith that under Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (TUPE), their future was secure. She said: “These staff will be given the opportunity to transfer to the new service providers under TUPE where those services are to continue.

“Staff who are unable to move to the new location will be offered a voluntary redundancy package or alternatives roles within East Coast, where available.”

Maria Eagle, Labour’s shadow Secretary of State for Transport, dismissed the suggestion as adding “insult to injury”. She said: “The buck must stop with Theresa Villiers and her fellow ministers in this Tory-led Government.

“They should be offering support for those who risk losing their jobs rather than making ridiculous suggestions that they move to India.”

A Department for Transport spokesman said: “National Express Services Ltd staff employed at Baron House will be given the opportunity to transfer to the new service provider under TUPE. Exactly how this works will be a matter for the new service provider.”

The worst case is that Google+ becomes to Facebook what Bing is to Google, less a real competitor than simply an alternative with some interesting features that aren’t sufficiently compelling to ever lift it above being a distant No. 2.

A Quick Conspiracy Theory

CPW — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:05:49 +0000

Still brilliant. Image Credit: Adam Thinks (http://adamthinks.com/tax-plan/)

Perhaps the recent Chinese hacking was actually the cause of Rep. Anthony Weiner‘s mistweeted wiener photo? Hackers accessed his Google and Twitter accounts and sent the infamous picture. Why, you ask?

Ha! As if it wasn’t already clear. All of this is obviously a nefarious plot.

The Chinese are secretly huge Obama fans. They love his socialist/fascist/Islamofascist/weak-kneed-liberal agenda, and also—believe it or not—he was born in Beijing and attended a Buddhist temple school for years before his mother fabricated the born-in-Kenya story before she fabricated the born-in-Hawaii story.

By diverting media attention to Weiner’s wiener, the Chinese have successfully hijacked the only serious news story in American politics today: THE SARAH PALIN BUS TOUR. If the media can’t cover her, she won’t get the precious limelight she needs to survive. She won’t be able to run for president and stop Obama’s secret plans to make America a Chinese fiefdom under sharia law. Even a media powerhouse like Sarah Palin can’t compete with illicit phalli. Americans know what they like, and imagining where famous phalli have gone is near the top of their list, even ahead of fantasizing about attractive women in positions of power.

Sound about right? I think I’d rather believe this than accept that we’re getting non-stop coverage of Sarah Palin and crotches this week because That’s Actually What Americans Want. Give me a few more minutes and I could probably work in Osama Bin Laden’s death.

Did The Chinese Hijacked The Net In April

agencynews — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:25:55 +0000

….. Well, unlikely.

The latest in a long (and recent) stream of “The Chinese are coming!” scare stories was initiated on Wednesday by McAfee. The fuse that McAfee lit was the 2010 Report to Congress of the US-China Economic and Security Commission.

Page 243 of the report (see page 251 of the PDF) includes a reference to an event from this past April, in which a routing error by a small Chinese ISP named IDC China was propagated by China’s state-owned China Telecommunications. As a result, tens of thousands of networks around the world, thousands of them in the US, were redirected to IDC China Telecommunication. Major providers were affected, including AT&T, Level3, Deutsche Telekom, Qwest Communications and Telefonica.

You may be reading about this for the first time, but it’s not news. In fact, the Commission cited as their source a contemporaneous New York Times reprint of an IDC story on the incident. Why didn’t the Homeland Security Alert Level go to Double-Secret Red at the time? Because stuff like this happens and the problem was fixed in 18 minutes.

But the report uses some unfortunate language:

For a brief period in April 2010, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm “hijacked” massive volumes of Internet traffic.

(It was denied by the Chinese Gov)

Security firms always being happy to overstate a threat, McAfee pushed a hysterical analysis of it to the press which played up every theoretical possibility, however remote. The result was a series of hysterical articles like this one.

Did any of them discuss all the difficult work involved in getting the proposed attacks to work correctly? The notion, and it’s true, is that if you route someone away from their network you can spoof IP addresses with impunity, making it very difficult to detect. So let’s assume someone hijacks the network for jointchiefsofstaff.mil and suddenly appears to be them. First, if the traffic is encrypted it will be difficult, if at all possible, to do anything. Second, both the source IP address and source TCP port must be spoofed. Third, the TCP sequence numbers will have to match. The TTL will also have to match. In other words, you’d need to know a great deal about the internals of the network and the systems that run on it before you commenced the attack. What will probably happen is what happened in the April 2010 case: Large numbers of network connections broke, people noticed immediately, and the issue was fixed promptly.

Via PC Mag.com, for more click here

Google hackers duped system administrators to penetrate networks, experts say

V SEKHAR — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:25:40 +0000

Washington Post | Wednesday, April 21, 2010 The hackers who penetrated the computer networks of Goog

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China, hacking, fact, opinion

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What the Fuck is Hack?, Oops, Chinese Hack?

Hacker (computer security)

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DARPA Rolls Out ‘Cyber Fast Track’ to Fund Hackers

One Response to DARPA Rolls Out ‘Cyber Fast Track’ to Fund Hackers

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 1, 2012 360 Comments

Hasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press

Multimedia

Related

Iran Confirms Attack by Virus That Collects Information (May 30, 2012)

Facing Cyberattack, Iranian Officials Disconnect Some Oil Terminals From Internet (April 24, 2012)

Times Topic: Cyberattacks on Iran — Stuxnet and Flame

Readers’ Comments

A version of this article appeared in print on June 1, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Order Sped Up Wave Of Cyberattacks Against Iran.

360 Comments

IDF says engaged in ‘constant cyber battle’

Achilles heel

‘Clearing the field’

Israeli hacker team brings down Iranian websites

English-language Iranian media outlet Press TV, Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education are hacked and taken offline.

Hackerspaces Global Space Program

Contents

[edit] DARPA funded Hackerspace Space Program

[edit] HSP Proposal

[edit] Prior Project Pages

[edit] Project Fundamentals

Honey Pot? (Score:2, Offtopic)

Finally (Score:1)

Mudge? This might actaully work then. (Score:5, Interesting)

Infinite Military Money (Score:3)

Just make sure (Score:1)

That is all well and good. (Score:1)

Non Americans (Score:2)

Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats (Score:2)