The Secret China-U.S. Hacking War? 107
bored-at-IETF-ntp-session writes "In an article at eWeek Larry Seltzer examines the supposed hacking war between the US and China. He surmises 'Even if you can't prove that the government was involved ... it still bears some responsibility'. He quotes Gadi Evron who advised the Estonians during the Russian attacks. 'I can confirm targeted attacks with sophisticated technologies have been launched against obvious enemies of China ... Who is behind these attacks can't be easily said, but it can be an American cyber-criminal, a Nigerian spammer or the Chinese themselves.' Seltzer concluded 'It's just another espionage tool, and no more or less moral than others we've used in the past.'" This a subject we've also previously discussed.
Re:talking about espionage (Score:3, Interesting)
It will indeed. Espionage is hardly immoral, when done by countries vs. one another. But, it is immoral to allow the collateral damage to get too high, to sweep innocent people into the fray, etc.
All science requires the articles of faith that the world makes sense, will continue to behave in the future the same as in the past, we can trust our senses/are not brains within jars, etc. But you are correct that most other articles of faith are orthoginal to science.
Re:Not suprised (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not suprised (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes I understand your scepticism. I used to think along same lines until having had looked at Snort logs.
Re:China ... is evil ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wiki tells a different story - about the Chinese Dumpling poison thing in Japan check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China#Tainted_Chinese_dumpling [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cardboard_bun_hoax [wikipedia.org]
How do we know it's the Chinese? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the comments above mentioned that "just mentioning the words 'network security' in China can land you a lot of jail time." If this is correct, then it seems to me that there are probably a lot of unsecured networks and hosts in China. If that is the case, then how do we know that it is really the Chinese who are trying to hack DoD and business networks rather than some thirteen year old script kiddie in Hackensack who just happened to find a way into a computer in some backwater school in China?
Just because you are seeing hits from Chinese IP addresses doesn't mean the Chinese are behind it. The real question is "how deep does the rabbit hole go?" Unfortunately, there isn't really any way to know unless you hack the originating IP(s) yourself.