Chinese Hacking - Say Something Nice or Don't Say Anything at All
By John Rasmussen
Posted: Feb 25, 2013
Mention somebody's family and see what happens.
The New York Times recently announced that the paper has been the victim of persistent cyber-attacks originating in China. Coincidently, Bloomberg and the Washington Post also reported attacks. Even Rupert Murdoch fired off some angry tweets announcing that his Wall Street Journal had also made it into the hacker's sights.
The attacks seemed to be related to reports regarding the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister. Many of Wen's immediate family have become hugely wealthy during his leadership rise- as the New York Times investigation outlined. Corporate and regulatory records indicate that many of the prime minister's relatives, including his wife, are controlling combined assets worth nearly $3 billion.
Wen, who has cultivated an image of living simply and having a common touch, holds huge sway and authority over the industries that his family made their fortunes in; a fact that they just have not been too keen to publicize in China – or in America, apparently.
Hacking by the Chinese military and its various security agencies appears to be the most un-secret secret ever. On February 19th, the Cyber Security firm, Mandiant, not only claimed that the Red Army was behind the bulk of cyber attacks directed at the U.S and other Western countries, but actually identified the building in China where these attacks originated from.
Late last year, a federal commission set to investigate cybercrimes issued a report labeling China as "the most threatening actor in cyberspace". According to the annual report, Chinese hackers are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to gain access to U.S. military computers and defense contractors.
This is not news. We've been hearing theses warnings and reports of counter measures for the past few years. What is news are the growing attacks against journalist and media outlets.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, the New York based media-rights group, said that the number of attacks against news organizations and reporters have seen a recent spike.
"We have seen distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks against individual journalists and against individual news outlets increasing over the last few years," Robert Mahoney, the rights group's deputy director, said on Feb 13th.
Denial of service attacks, while not as complex as say hacking into the Pentagon or a financial institution, are nonetheless "becoming increasingly sophisticated...it's very cheap to hire criminal hackers to mount such a distributed denial of service attack and digital security, information security is vital," Mahoney said.
Worse yet, in some cases, they might not even be criminal or working for the military or the government.
In a recent article on Discover.com, tech security expert, Bruce Schneier theorizes that some of these hackers have a higher calling. "They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else."
Schneier said that they are in it for basically two reasons: Fame and Glory...and to make a living. "Some of these hackers are heroes in China. They're upholding the country's honor against both anti-Chinese forces like the pro-Tibet movement and larger forces like the United States."
By hiring an outside criminal group or organization or by turning a blind eye to a 'patriotic' one, it also gives the government a bit of deniability when these disruptions become public.
The U.S. is China's second biggest trading partner- second only to the E.U. However, with these persistent cyber attacks against American defense agencies; financial institutions; corporations, universities and now blatant attacks against her free press, China is starting to run a risky gamble of seriously alienating her trading partner.
Eventually, if companies feel their trade secrets are threatened, they will stop doing business with China. As a government, if these attacks persist and the source is consistent and obvious, the U.S. might find itself re-thinking trade status or restrictions and quite possibly even sanctions with one of its biggest trading partners.
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