12 ms·

When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us

61 points by wolfgke 8y ago

lightbyte 8y ago
>Back in 2015, though, GitHub was still an up-and-coming, independent company whose success came from making it considerably easier for other people to create computer software. GitHub was an "up-and-coming" company just three years ago in 2015? They were founded in 2008 and immediately exploded in popularity. I can't take the rest of the article seriously after reading just three paragraphs.
- thro_a_way 8y ago
  I did take the article seriously. It was quite informative and entertaining. Very nice writing style.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  I would consider the audience not being engineers who use tools/services like github everyday. At the end of the day, github wasn't some huge public company with high market cap, and were recently bought by microsoft.
- goobynight 8y ago
  Up and coming doesn't mean small. It certainly saw significant growth from 2015-18. I don't think it's too egregious to write that, even if I wouldn't do it myself.
fouc 8y ago
"Us" vs "Them" is a cognitive bias. A title that attempts to exacerbate that bias isn't very nice.
- deogeo 8y ago
  It's also a survival strategy - the counterpoint to 'divide and conquer'. What happens to a group that doesn't unite or fight back because "Well we're not free of sin either"?
- uberman 8y ago
  Are you suggesting that "we" are using the "great cannon" to target "ourselves" then?
- kylec 8y ago
  If that’s how the people engaging in these attack see it, I would say the title is appropriate
- Supermancho 8y ago
  Take any given server. Log the IPs of invalid SSH attempts to access the machine over 3 months. Plot the IPs on a geolocation. Chinese originating IPs are the overwhelming number. I posted my actual data years ago as a response to some comment, but I could just grab my recent logs and nothing has changed much (frequency, outliers, and some volume trading). While the phrasing may be obtuse, it's a sentiment reflecting reality.
  - auiya 8y ago
    It would stand to reason. China has the largest number of endpoints, and thus is most likely to have the largest number of compromised hosts. I take it you've ruled out the possibility this is a geographically diverse spread of actors taking advantage of poor security practices on the large swaths of Chinese infrastructure in your logs?
  - monocasa 8y ago
    China has large numbers of pirated unpatched systems meaning that botnets have large presences in China, regardless of who's running their command and control.
tomohawk 8y ago
Yet more evidence that shows the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in suppressing people's rights in order to enhance their own power.
bigmonads 8y ago
The article misses the context of our generation, in which multiple Western and Eastern governments as an underlying trend have been exercising the same behaviors. Australia officially banned strong encryption for state surveillance this week. The Unite States got caught in the world's most intrusive global and domestic surveillance effort and buried the news of this through its relationship with the domestic press. Poland repealed its supreme court after upending its government. Israel has been criticized for its domestic assassination program targeting thousands of people a year. The United States has a threat scoring system automatically scoring political, social, economic, and other "risk" data into municipal police departments so that these people can be monitored and managed without a warrant. The fact of the matter is Western nations have been engaging on censorship, surveillance and "perception management" and "strategic communication" (read: propaganda) campaigns at home and around the world for decades. Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the British in this article? Overall, disappointed at the narrow view of the article. It can't offer solutions because its hasn't identified the problems.
- hangonhn 8y ago
  "Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the British in this article?" Can you point us to some articles about this? I've never heard of this. It's fascinating!
  - bigmonads 8y ago
    Looking for them. I got this from following reports and dialogues from American Think Tanks (primarily the Center for Strategic and International Studies). Essentially over the past decade there's been fairly regular dialogue between the British government and China regarding online, radio and publication public engagement. There's been some British universities, thinktanks and others "accused" of helping China (e.g. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/westminster-and-kings-accused-of-helping-chinese-teach-propaganda-g2982z3sj https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/westminster-and-kings-acc...) but from strategy side of the house (at least at CSIS, which is American) there hasn't been a lot of angst or fretting over it. I'll look for some specific CSIS reports.
walrus01 8y ago
A DDoS is not "hacking". I've personally seen DDoS much bigger than the one described in the article over things as trivial as League of Legends online gaming.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
candiodari 8y ago
DDOSses (some of them) from China are indeed incredible. You trace them back, and they turn out to come from the central datacenters of China Telecom itself. Right out of the middle of their network core. At first you think "IP spoofing". Every self-respecting DDOSer does it these days. And that's true. Then you start tracing the path of the traffic. Turns out the packets come straight from direct peering interface with China Telecom, in Hong Kong. The IPs WEREN'T spoofed (so luckily they suck at it, or at least some departments do). Absolutely incredible. In my opinion this government maintains datacenters, at least 40-50 racks, JUST for ddosing sites they dislike on the internet. Just imagine what the legal and PR disaster any western telco would face if they had maintained a datacenter dedicated to sabotaging others on the internet. Incredible. It also makes it hard to decide what to do. Cut off China Telecom ? You get a choice: cut off all government (and academia) in China, or cut off everyone else (except "special economic zones"). That's pretty much it for mainland traffic. Incredible.
squozzer 8y ago
>GitHub and Tibetans like Lobsang Sither were among the first victims on a new front in China’s war on the internet, launched by a new breed of censor determined to go after the country’s enemies wherever they might be, using whatever means necessary. I wonder if China's fentanyl factories aren't plugged into the internet...

61 points by wolfgke 8y ago

>Back in 2015, though, GitHub was still an up-and-coming, independent company whose success came from making it considerably easier for other people to create computer software. GitHub was an "up-and-coming" company just three years ago in 2015? They were founded in 2008 and immediately exploded in popularity. I can't take the rest of the article seriously after reading just three paragraphs.

thro_a_way 8y ago
I did take the article seriously. It was quite informative and entertaining. Very nice writing style.
bluntfang 8y ago
I would consider the audience not being engineers who use tools/services like github everyday. At the end of the day, github wasn't some huge public company with high market cap, and were recently bought by microsoft.
goobynight 8y ago
Up and coming doesn't mean small. It certainly saw significant growth from 2015-18. I don't think it's too egregious to write that, even if I wouldn't do it myself.

fouc 8y ago

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

deogeo 8y ago
It's also a survival strategy - the counterpoint to 'divide and conquer'. What happens to a group that doesn't unite or fight back because "Well we're not free of sin either"?
uberman 8y ago
Are you suggesting that "we" are using the "great cannon" to target "ourselves" then?
kylec 8y ago
If that’s how the people engaging in these attack see it, I would say the title is appropriate
Supermancho 8y ago
Take any given server. Log the IPs of invalid SSH attempts to access the machine over 3 months. Plot the IPs on a geolocation. Chinese originating IPs are the overwhelming number. I posted my actual data years ago as a response to some comment, but I could just grab my recent logs and nothing has changed much (frequency, outliers, and some volume trading). While the phrasing may be obtuse, it's a sentiment reflecting reality.
- auiya 8y ago
  It would stand to reason. China has the largest number of endpoints, and thus is most likely to have the largest number of compromised hosts. I take it you've ruled out the possibility this is a geographically diverse spread of actors taking advantage of poor security practices on the large swaths of Chinese infrastructure in your logs?
- monocasa 8y ago
  China has large numbers of pirated unpatched systems meaning that botnets have large presences in China, regardless of who's running their command and control.

tomohawk 8y ago

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

bigmonads 8y ago

The article misses the context of our generation, in which multiple Western and Eastern governments as an underlying trend have been exercising the same behaviors. Australia officially banned strong encryption for state surveillance this week. The Unite States got caught in the world's most intrusive global and domestic surveillance effort and buried the news of this through its relationship with the domestic press. Poland repealed its supreme court after upending its government. Israel has been criticized for its domestic assassination program targeting thousands of people a year. The United States has a threat scoring system automatically scoring political, social, economic, and other "risk" data into municipal police departments so that these people can be monitored and managed without a warrant. The fact of the matter is Western nations have been engaging on censorship, surveillance and "perception management" and "strategic communication" (read: propaganda) campaigns at home and around the world for decades. Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the British in this article? Overall, disappointed at the narrow view of the article. It can't offer solutions because its hasn't identified the problems.

hangonhn 8y ago
"Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the British in this article?" Can you point us to some articles about this? I've never heard of this. It's fascinating!
- bigmonads 8y ago
  Looking for them. I got this from following reports and dialogues from American Think Tanks (primarily the Center for Strategic and International Studies). Essentially over the past decade there's been fairly regular dialogue between the British government and China regarding online, radio and publication public engagement. There's been some British universities, thinktanks and others "accused" of helping China (e.g. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/westminster-and-kings-accused-of-helping-chinese-teach-propaganda-g2982z3sj https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/westminster-and-kings-acc...) but from strategy side of the house (at least at CSIS, which is American) there hasn't been a lot of angst or fretting over it. I'll look for some specific CSIS reports.

walrus01 8y ago

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

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

candiodari 8y ago

DDOSses (some of them) from China are indeed incredible. You trace them back, and they turn out to come from the central datacenters of China Telecom itself. Right out of the middle of their network core. At first you think "IP spoofing". Every self-respecting DDOSer does it these days. And that's true. Then you start tracing the path of the traffic. Turns out the packets come straight from direct peering interface with China Telecom, in Hong Kong. The IPs WEREN'T spoofed (so luckily they suck at it, or at least some departments do). Absolutely incredible. In my opinion this government maintains datacenters, at least 40-50 racks, JUST for ddosing sites they dislike on the internet. Just imagine what the legal and PR disaster any western telco would face if they had maintained a datacenter dedicated to sabotaging others on the internet. Incredible. It also makes it hard to decide what to do. Cut off China Telecom ? You get a choice: cut off all government (and academia) in China, or cut off everyone else (except "special economic zones"). That's pretty much it for mainland traffic. Incredible.

squozzer 8y ago

>GitHub and Tibetans like Lobsang Sither were among the first victims on a new front in China’s war on the internet, launched by a new breed of censor determined to go after the country’s enemies wherever they might be, using whatever means necessary. I wonder if China's fentanyl factories aren't plugged into the internet...