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It's always baffled me as to why Russia gets so much attention when it comes to election hacking, when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as Chin

It's always baffled me as to why Russia gets so much attention when it comes to election hacking, when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as China.

basementcat 7y ago
Is it because China appears to have done a better job of projecting soft power in recent history than Russia?
- devoply 7y ago
  Pretty much and the US and its five eyes allies are the kings of soft power in espionage. Blaming people for hacking them while being the biggest hackers of them all, etc. The West is either oblivious or true believers. But really at the end of the day it's more or less the side that you are on that determines your truth, not the actual truth. The issue then is that we thought China was on our side, then we discovered that not really they had their own ambitions which do not coincide with ours. And so we're slowing trying to take away as much power as we can from them so we can bring them under control. These pronouncements then are an attack on China's soft power as everyone is doing it anyway all the time. It seems at the same time China is attempting to establish its own power structure while trying to negotiate with the West, look for instance at the moves it is making with Iran.
  - pfisch 7y ago
    > Blaming people for hacking them while being the biggest hacker of them all Uhh, what?
    - devoply 7y ago
      You forgot about Dre, I mean Snowden?
      - pfisch 7y ago
        I mean isn't that in reality of actual usage defensive hacking though? The US isn't waging aggressive offensive hacking wars against other countries beyond targeting weapons r&d. The same can't be said of Russia, China, etc. The US does have such capabilities but has been far more restrained in the use of them than its enemies.
        cygx 7y ago
        Exactly: Without defensive actions such as spying on top officials, who knows what rogue states like Germany would get up to...
        koonsolo 7y ago
        True, it's not like they use it for economical gain agains companies from allied countries. That would be bad right? * cough * Echelon * cough
        pfisch 7y ago
        I wasn't aware of this. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    You can't build an effective defense in cyber, or we haven't over the past 20 years. It's all offense. One senior three letter agency guy said if cyber were a football match, the score would be 421-420 at the 20min mark. It's all offense, so blaming one side for being the aggressor is a weird point.
    - koonsolo 7y ago
      What offence did EU do? Genuinely curious, because it seems it's all defence over here, unlike the other big powers in the world.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
        You're probably right about the offensive aspect - the member states very often disagree on much simpler issues, I can't imagine them getting their act together on something as controversial. As for defense, the EU can't do much, sorry. Most interesting things are done at the hardware level. As for software, maybe they could sponsor security code reviews of some critical elements of open source ecosystem and encourage users to use them, but it would work only if these users used these components exclusively which is never going to happen, even in government.
        friendlybus 7y ago
        In 2015ish Dan Geer, a prominent cybersecurity expert got up and said in a talk, we don't know if vulnerabilities are sparse in quantity or dense. If they are sparse and there is actually such thing as a system that can be secured by doing the work of patching all the vulns up, then Dan argues that the US should be paying double what everyone else pays for bug bounties, so that the vulns get patched up and anybody who attempts to hide secret vulns will be aware their competitor(s) is going to cash in and be pressured to do so themselves. If vulnerabilities are dense and there will always be more than we can patch.. well computers are a strange beast.
      - dragonelite 7y ago
        I know that the dutch papers were super proud the intelligence agency had hacked multiple Russian institution.
smt88 7y ago
It’s probably the fact that Russia tried, succeeded, and continues to do it to the US, the most dangerous country in the world. I haven’t heard anything about real-world Chinese attacks on US election systems, though they may have happened. It certainly doesn’t seem like any succeeded. Also: China and the US need each other as trading partners. Russia is not as vital a trade partner to us.
- simplecomplex 7y ago
  “Russia tried, succeeded, and continues to do it to the US“? Source? Which computer system did they break into, and how is it attributed to the Russian government? Every time in the past when someone says this to me or I search for it online, the “hack” is that US citizens voted for Donald Trump. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_... Doesn’t show any convincing evidence of hacking into election systems, or what the result of the hack was. At best I can see that people suspect WikiLeaks is connected to Russian intelligence and that the Hillary email leak originated with them, but there’s little evidence to support that. Besides, that’s not hacking any computer systems related to the election.
  - CalChris 7y ago
    This is well known. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/politics/russian-hacking-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/politics/russian-hacki...
    - mistermann 7y ago
      Were any details on the mechanisms they used released? The article is paywalled for me, but any article I've read only states that it was "concluded". Like, what attack vector did they use, do all states use common voting machines? EDIT: Was able to read it, and they don't even suggest any evidence. As usual, we have to take it on faith. Sorry, my faith cup has runneth out.
      - 7y ago
adventured 7y ago
> when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as China You answered your own baffle, it's right there. You know why the US didn't suffer painful sanctions for its Iraq invasion and debacle (which ~3/4+ of the world was overwhelmingly against)? Because the US-allied world runs the world, mostly, and the US was the world's only superpower both economically and militarily (throw in the global reserve currency for good measure). China carries an increasingly big stick and a very aggressive attitude that it's their way or else (and they mean it). It's exactly the same reason Muslim countries won't do anything to them or say almost anything to them about Xinjiang; they're afraid of China and they know China does not respond to the normal stimulus / protest that democratic, human-rights-based nations do. So Russia has the authoritarian, no-human-rights disregard aspect that China has, although to a slightly lesser extent (Putin's dictatorship is nowhere near as powerful or enduring as the CPC party dictatorship). The problem for Russia is that they're economically weak and backwards. They can be easily pushed around and contained economically. Russia is also a regional military power, China is about to be a global military power (certainly within ~20 years). What is Russia going to do, commit suicide by shutting off their energy exports? Are they going to shut down all their vast factories (which don't exist) and hammer the global economy? Are they going to lock down access to their technology & science? Are they going to further restrict their vast consumer market (which doesn't exist)? The best Russia can do is poke Europe with energy, tamper occasionally with the Middle East, and mess with Ukraine. Meanwhile China just went and annexed a country the size of France in Asia - stealing vast territory from numerous other countries through military force - in the South China Sea; nobody did anything to stop it or sanction China for it. Nobody will do anything about it, either. China is in a position now where they are able to play by different rules than everybody else, and there is nothing that anybody can or will do about it. That is going to get worse yet, their military power is nowhere close to peaking, so their projection and aggression will only increase for decades yet.
- hos234 7y ago
  Chinese takeout > McD, KFC and Pizza Hut. So I welcome this new development.
  - partialrecall 7y ago
dmix 7y ago
China probably just didn't see as much value in pushing for such a person (or maybe either), combined with Russia backing a person the media/establishment found so undesirable it naturally draws attention. Since Trump was clearly hostile to China during the whole thing and continues to be in power, if anything they likely would have pushed for a more mainline establishment person to keep the status quo. Which is the type of thing which doesn't generate nearly as much noise. It's only a problem when it's a problem, otherwise we don't hear 99% of what the NSA et al collects regarding nation state hacking. Plus most of this stuff regarding Australia sounds like collection for predictive and intelligence analysis purposes, not directly engaging via spending a couple million on FB/Twitter ads. Additionally tapping into private data feeds purely for collection can't be as easily spun into "hacking the election" headlines. Otherwise China's "50 cent party" is quite well known from well before any of this election stuff and they seem to be focused mostly on astroturfing Chinese issues. Which again isnt as newsworthy as buying some politically taboo advertisements on Facebook. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
rosege 7y ago
Your mention of China's resources reminded me of an interview the ambassador to China in Australia gave to the TV show Lateline back in 2005. Watching at the time I was just amazed at her blatant lying on things that were so obvious. She was asked about China's vast network of agents in Australia and she claimed: We are a poor country. We have 70 [per cent] people living in rural area. We are very busy, very, very busy working to develop our own country. So these kind of stories is really very absurd. Pity the video is no longer available - but transcript still is: https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/diplomat-affair-arousing-concern-with-chinese/1587196 https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/diplomat-affair-arousing-con...
- Bendingo 7y ago
  > "We are a poor country. We have 70 [per cent] people living in rural area. We are very busy, very, very busy working to develop our own country. So these kind of stories is really very absurd." Which part of that is a blatant lie?
  - rosege 7y ago
    that they are too poor and busy to spy on their ex-pats in Australia.
    - chrischen 7y ago
      What if I called you a liar? Who's to prove me wrong?
      - chrischen 7y ago
        For context, OP changed his comment, but I was replying to his previous comment to point out his hypocrisy.
      - rosege 7y ago
        well if you believe what the ambassador said then I would love to sell you some shares in our harbour bridge.
75dvtwin 7y ago
> It's always baffled me as to why Russia gets so much attention when it comes to election hacking, when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as China. It is because the organizers of the coup against President Trump, have chosen 'Russia collusion' to be their main subversion story. So anything that remotely helps that story, validated or not, will be, necessarily, multiplied through the megaphones of the Left's propaganda machines (that includes 'fair' moderators on most public forum). See subversion tactics described here [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion
cltsang 7y ago
I'm not an American, but as far as I could tell Americans grow up learning the history about Russian being the arch-enemy, so Russia hacking is so much easier to digest. China's is a relatively new threat. On top of that, it could be hard to get a grasp of how hostile China is when the Chinese officials on TV often sound so normal and friendly. It's similar for the rest of the world
Leary 7y ago
Because a preponderance of actual evidence supports the former.
odiroot 7y ago
China is a soft power. Or at least softer. They work stealthily. Russia flexes with nukes, tanks and submarines. As evidenced in Ukraine (Crimea, Donbas) and Georgia.
ghostcluster 7y ago
there's a bigger problem with China. due to their incredible economic rise since they implemented market reforms in the late 1970s, so many businesses depend on their market for a substantial fraction of their revenues. thus, fewer people are willing to speak out about their issues. one reason i'm against biden is the chinese communist party invested 1.5 billion in his son's private equity fund.. https://nypost.com/2019/05/11/the-troubling-reason-why-biden-is-so-soft-on-china/ https://nypost.com/2019/05/11/the-troubling-reason-why-biden... https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business/ https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business...

It's always baffled me as to why Russia gets so much attention when it comes to election hacking, when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as China.

basementcat 7y ago

Is it because China appears to have done a better job of projecting soft power in recent history than Russia?

devoply 7y ago
Pretty much and the US and its five eyes allies are the kings of soft power in espionage. Blaming people for hacking them while being the biggest hackers of them all, etc. The West is either oblivious or true believers. But really at the end of the day it's more or less the side that you are on that determines your truth, not the actual truth. The issue then is that we thought China was on our side, then we discovered that not really they had their own ambitions which do not coincide with ours. And so we're slowing trying to take away as much power as we can from them so we can bring them under control. These pronouncements then are an attack on China's soft power as everyone is doing it anyway all the time. It seems at the same time China is attempting to establish its own power structure while trying to negotiate with the West, look for instance at the moves it is making with Iran.
- pfisch 7y ago
  > Blaming people for hacking them while being the biggest hacker of them all Uhh, what?
  - devoply 7y ago
    You forgot about Dre, I mean Snowden?
    - pfisch 7y ago
      I mean isn't that in reality of actual usage defensive hacking though? The US isn't waging aggressive offensive hacking wars against other countries beyond targeting weapons r&d. The same can't be said of Russia, China, etc. The US does have such capabilities but has been far more restrained in the use of them than its enemies.
      - cygx 7y ago
        Exactly: Without defensive actions such as spying on top officials, who knows what rogue states like Germany would get up to...
      - koonsolo 7y ago
        True, it's not like they use it for economical gain agains companies from allied countries. That would be bad right? * cough * Echelon * cough
        pfisch 7y ago
        I wasn't aware of this. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  You can't build an effective defense in cyber, or we haven't over the past 20 years. It's all offense. One senior three letter agency guy said if cyber were a football match, the score would be 421-420 at the 20min mark. It's all offense, so blaming one side for being the aggressor is a weird point.
  - koonsolo 7y ago
    What offence did EU do? Genuinely curious, because it seems it's all defence over here, unlike the other big powers in the world.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
      You're probably right about the offensive aspect - the member states very often disagree on much simpler issues, I can't imagine them getting their act together on something as controversial. As for defense, the EU can't do much, sorry. Most interesting things are done at the hardware level. As for software, maybe they could sponsor security code reviews of some critical elements of open source ecosystem and encourage users to use them, but it would work only if these users used these components exclusively which is never going to happen, even in government.
      - friendlybus 7y ago
        In 2015ish Dan Geer, a prominent cybersecurity expert got up and said in a talk, we don't know if vulnerabilities are sparse in quantity or dense. If they are sparse and there is actually such thing as a system that can be secured by doing the work of patching all the vulns up, then Dan argues that the US should be paying double what everyone else pays for bug bounties, so that the vulns get patched up and anybody who attempts to hide secret vulns will be aware their competitor(s) is going to cash in and be pressured to do so themselves. If vulnerabilities are dense and there will always be more than we can patch.. well computers are a strange beast.
    - dragonelite 7y ago
      I know that the dutch papers were super proud the intelligence agency had hacked multiple Russian institution.

smt88 7y ago

It’s probably the fact that Russia tried, succeeded, and continues to do it to the US, the most dangerous country in the world. I haven’t heard anything about real-world Chinese attacks on US election systems, though they may have happened. It certainly doesn’t seem like any succeeded. Also: China and the US need each other as trading partners. Russia is not as vital a trade partner to us.

simplecomplex 7y ago
“Russia tried, succeeded, and continues to do it to the US“? Source? Which computer system did they break into, and how is it attributed to the Russian government? Every time in the past when someone says this to me or I search for it online, the “hack” is that US citizens voted for Donald Trump. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_... Doesn’t show any convincing evidence of hacking into election systems, or what the result of the hack was. At best I can see that people suspect WikiLeaks is connected to Russian intelligence and that the Hillary email leak originated with them, but there’s little evidence to support that. Besides, that’s not hacking any computer systems related to the election.
- CalChris 7y ago
  This is well known. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/politics/russian-hacking-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/politics/russian-hacki...
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Were any details on the mechanisms they used released? The article is paywalled for me, but any article I've read only states that it was "concluded". Like, what attack vector did they use, do all states use common voting machines? EDIT: Was able to read it, and they don't even suggest any evidence. As usual, we have to take it on faith. Sorry, my faith cup has runneth out.
    - 7y ago

adventured 7y ago

> when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as China You answered your own baffle, it's right there. You know why the US didn't suffer painful sanctions for its Iraq invasion and debacle (which ~3/4+ of the world was overwhelmingly against)? Because the US-allied world runs the world, mostly, and the US was the world's only superpower both economically and militarily (throw in the global reserve currency for good measure). China carries an increasingly big stick and a very aggressive attitude that it's their way or else (and they mean it). It's exactly the same reason Muslim countries won't do anything to them or say almost anything to them about Xinjiang; they're afraid of China and they know China does not respond to the normal stimulus / protest that democratic, human-rights-based nations do. So Russia has the authoritarian, no-human-rights disregard aspect that China has, although to a slightly lesser extent (Putin's dictatorship is nowhere near as powerful or enduring as the CPC party dictatorship). The problem for Russia is that they're economically weak and backwards. They can be easily pushed around and contained economically. Russia is also a regional military power, China is about to be a global military power (certainly within ~20 years). What is Russia going to do, commit suicide by shutting off their energy exports? Are they going to shut down all their vast factories (which don't exist) and hammer the global economy? Are they going to lock down access to their technology & science? Are they going to further restrict their vast consumer market (which doesn't exist)? The best Russia can do is poke Europe with energy, tamper occasionally with the Middle East, and mess with Ukraine. Meanwhile China just went and annexed a country the size of France in Asia - stealing vast territory from numerous other countries through military force - in the South China Sea; nobody did anything to stop it or sanction China for it. Nobody will do anything about it, either. China is in a position now where they are able to play by different rules than everybody else, and there is nothing that anybody can or will do about it. That is going to get worse yet, their military power is nowhere close to peaking, so their projection and aggression will only increase for decades yet.

hos234 7y ago
Chinese takeout > McD, KFC and Pizza Hut. So I welcome this new development.
- partialrecall 7y ago

dmix 7y ago

China probably just didn't see as much value in pushing for such a person (or maybe either), combined with Russia backing a person the media/establishment found so undesirable it naturally draws attention. Since Trump was clearly hostile to China during the whole thing and continues to be in power, if anything they likely would have pushed for a more mainline establishment person to keep the status quo. Which is the type of thing which doesn't generate nearly as much noise. It's only a problem when it's a problem, otherwise we don't hear 99% of what the NSA et al collects regarding nation state hacking. Plus most of this stuff regarding Australia sounds like collection for predictive and intelligence analysis purposes, not directly engaging via spending a couple million on FB/Twitter ads. Additionally tapping into private data feeds purely for collection can't be as easily spun into "hacking the election" headlines. Otherwise China's "50 cent party" is quite well known from well before any of this election stuff and they seem to be focused mostly on astroturfing Chinese issues. Which again isnt as newsworthy as buying some politically taboo advertisements on Facebook. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

rosege 7y ago

Your mention of China's resources reminded me of an interview the ambassador to China in Australia gave to the TV show Lateline back in 2005. Watching at the time I was just amazed at her blatant lying on things that were so obvious. She was asked about China's vast network of agents in Australia and she claimed: We are a poor country. We have 70 [per cent] people living in rural area. We are very busy, very, very busy working to develop our own country. So these kind of stories is really very absurd. Pity the video is no longer available - but transcript still is: https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/diplomat-affair-arousing-concern-with-chinese/1587196 https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/diplomat-affair-arousing-con...

Bendingo 7y ago
> "We are a poor country. We have 70 [per cent] people living in rural area. We are very busy, very, very busy working to develop our own country. So these kind of stories is really very absurd." Which part of that is a blatant lie?
- rosege 7y ago
  that they are too poor and busy to spy on their ex-pats in Australia.
  - chrischen 7y ago
    What if I called you a liar? Who's to prove me wrong?
    - chrischen 7y ago
      For context, OP changed his comment, but I was replying to his previous comment to point out his hypocrisy.
    - rosege 7y ago
      well if you believe what the ambassador said then I would love to sell you some shares in our harbour bridge.

75dvtwin 7y ago

> It's always baffled me as to why Russia gets so much attention when it comes to election hacking, when they have a fraction of the resources and economy as China. It is because the organizers of the coup against President Trump, have chosen 'Russia collusion' to be their main subversion story. So anything that remotely helps that story, validated or not, will be, necessarily, multiplied through the megaphones of the Left's propaganda machines (that includes 'fair' moderators on most public forum). See subversion tactics described here [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion

cltsang 7y ago

I'm not an American, but as far as I could tell Americans grow up learning the history about Russian being the arch-enemy, so Russia hacking is so much easier to digest. China's is a relatively new threat. On top of that, it could be hard to get a grasp of how hostile China is when the Chinese officials on TV often sound so normal and friendly. It's similar for the rest of the world

Leary 7y ago

Because a preponderance of actual evidence supports the former.

odiroot 7y ago

China is a soft power. Or at least softer. They work stealthily. Russia flexes with nukes, tanks and submarines. As evidenced in Ukraine (Crimea, Donbas) and Georgia.

ghostcluster 7y ago

there's a bigger problem with China. due to their incredible economic rise since they implemented market reforms in the late 1970s, so many businesses depend on their market for a substantial fraction of their revenues. thus, fewer people are willing to speak out about their issues. one reason i'm against biden is the chinese communist party invested 1.5 billion in his son's private equity fund.. https://nypost.com/2019/05/11/the-troubling-reason-why-biden-is-so-soft-on-china/ https://nypost.com/2019/05/11/the-troubling-reason-why-biden... https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business/ https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business...