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I believe that Chinese hackers are the scariest thing in the world today. I think that the threat from cyber warfare might be slightly overblown (though the nex

• unimpressive 14y ago
  >I believe that Chinese hackers are the scariest thing in the world today. I'm much more worried about nuclear weapons, Authoritarianism, and biological warfare.
  • lostlogin 14y ago
    The Chinese government?
    • unimpressive 14y ago
      I'm not exceptionally worried about China's nukes. They understand MAD. I'm more worried about the middle east. Authoritarianism is more worrying if it's in the country I'm standing on. My main fear with biological warfare is non-state actors. As it becomes possible to do more with less, the chances of fundamentalists and other malicious parties using biological agents for terrorism or worse go up.
      • dontstealmyname 14y ago
        The Chinese government made a statement last year about MAD. It basically boiled down to their population being so large and spread out so far across china that they would still have a large enough population base to continue on past past the Armageddon to rebuild while everywhere else would suffer a lot higher casualty rates because a lot of the developed world is concentrated in large cities. IIRC one of the main reasons MAD was a threat to the Russians was because they're populated centres are mostly in one area of the country. Its all saber rattling regardless I guess, as china develops they'll be more so concentrated in cities like everyone else.
        • chalst 14y ago
          All of the most populous, productive area of China are concentrated along the coast and around the four main inland cities: over 3/4s of Chinese GDP comes from these, which cover relatively little area. China might be less vulnerable than the USSR was to targetted nuclear strikes, but I doubt it is less so than the US, and I doubt Chinese leadership believe China would have the advantage against the US if a military conflict turned nuclear. Who made the statement?
          • Jd 14y ago
            There was a Chinese general (Zhu Chenghu) who has made several controversial statements to this end, including that initiating nuclear war would be acceptable in case of US intrusion in Taiwan (still considered by most mainland Chinese as a Chinese possession). However, to the best of my knowledge he hasn't been in the press the last couple of years.
        • powertower 14y ago
          As far as I'm aware, their strategy is based on a scenario where the US can and does defeat it in a nuclear war. And hence that strategy works to prevent that attack, not defeat it... Have a bunch of relatively large (much larger that the US's) warheads strike American cities exclusively. Forget about military targets.
  • jlgreco 14y ago
    Also drunk drivers, lightning strikes, and spiders... Seriously, who actually experiences fear because of chinese hackers?
    • methehack 14y ago
      After reading the article, that would be me. Why do you think they've worked their asses off to be able to shut off our power grid? Can you think of an explanation that isn't just a little bit spooky?
      • olalonde 14y ago
        You think the US government doesn't do similar things in China? Should people living in China be spooked?
        • intended 14y ago
          Thats really not an answer. Just because people in both countries can now face a new angle of attack doesn't mean that there is something to not be spooked about. People in both countries should be equally spooked. The USA has more to lose in this battle - for a nation moving away from manufacturing and aiming to keep a tech lead for its economy - China's actions eventually would mean check mate.
      • Herover 14y ago
        Problem is, they would probably shut themself out if they turned off the power...
      • vorg 14y ago
        Why would the Chinese want to shut off the US power grid? The reason why they built nukes to defend against Russia and none to defend against the US is they want to take over the US by immigrating there in large numbers. Australia/NZ and Canada today were just trial runs. There were 1 million ethnic Chinese in the US in 1990; by 2010 there were 3 million. Extrapolating the geometric series, 10 million by 2030, 30 million by 2050, and 100 million by 2070. Their students are coming to rent the houses, get jobs afterwards, then buy the houses. Americans will vote for the government that lets in more rich Asian immigrants, so house prices go up higher. By 2100, the US will be a majority Chinese nation, and the Ming Dynasty's big mistake of closing down Zheng He's 15th century treasure fleet will have been rectified.
• alexqgb 14y ago
  I don't think you know what saber rattling actually means.
• sliverstorm 14y ago
  If Chinese hackers want what's on a given hard disk, there's no way to stop them. To which I answer, air gap. Yes, the air gap can be compromised, but at that point you aren't just talking hackers in China. You're talking organized crime with cat burglars breaking into US facilities.
  • simula67 14y ago
    You're talking organized crime with cat burglars breaking into US facilities. Another method is Social Engineering.
  • Soft 14y ago
    Sure we can secure a certain piece of information if no one has to ever access it. Hard drive in a locked box inside some bunker type of thing. It becomes hard when the information must be easily accessible to multiple persons operating from different places.
• belorn 14y ago
  > People absolutely freak out when they suspect the US government of spying on a citizen. Why would they only spy on citizens? They have a long history of sharing corporate espionage when corporate data is snatched in their net (http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/19/114807.shtml http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/19/114807.sht... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy). Economic espionage by governments began way before internet even was a thing. Not that this makes it right for china to use hackers for the same goal, but at the same time it is nothing new. The biggest difference between NSA and the Chinese hackers are that the NSA are mostly passive listeners on the wire, passing along what they "hear" to corporations. Chinese hackers are more active listeners, and pass along what they "find" to corporations. Still, not much of a difference in my book.
• simonh 14y ago
  I hear that a lot, but the truth is that the next Perl Harbour has already happened. It was a surprise aerial attack on a strategic port city back in 2001. Almost 3,000 people were killed. I don't believe any cyber attack is likely to be that dramatic or destructive for the same reasons that computer systems are hard to protect. Complexity. It's hard to protect a computer system because there are so many potential vulnerabilities. It's easier to take one down, but that won't necessarily result in much damage. To do that you need to take over a complex system and exercise sophisticated and dynamic control of it, to orchestrate very specific behaviour, which is not easy. For example shutting down the computers at a nuclear power plant may be feasible. However taking control of it and manipulating it with enough sophistication to engineer a meltdown, while overcoming all the computerised and physical safeguards would be a lot more complex to pull off.
  • EliRivers 14y ago
    "I hear that a lot, but the truth is that the next Perl Harbour has already happened. It was a surprise aerial attack on a strategic port city back in 2001. Almost 3,000 people were killed." The Pearl Harbour attack was an attempt by a government to cripple an enemy's capability to project power in the Pacific ocean, with the attacker's intent to then establish dominance in that region. What you describe was nothing of the sort and to call it another Pearl Harbour is simply wrong.
    • simonh 14y ago
      Fair point, I stand corrected. I think the rest of my point in the second paragraph stands though.
      • holychiz 14y ago
        this is why i love HN where reasonable people are willing to consider different perspectives and make their choices of conviction. thanks for the conversation.
    • yk 14y ago
      If you define Pearl Harbour as a military attack, then yes. But if you look at the cultural and political impact of 9/11 and Pearl Harbour, then they are quite similar. Both did change US policy and politics, have both generated treatment in movies and books and perhaps most strikingly are used in a phrase like "The next ..."
• iooi 14y ago
  >Chinese hackers have more power than the CIA, KGB and Gestapo combined, and nothing short of WWIII can slow them down. A bit over the top? You really aren't suggesting a start to WWIII over a couple of nytimes articles right?
• paganel 14y ago
  > Companies have lost as much as a billion dollars in ip in a single night. I guess the Chinese should know a thing or two about failing to keep ownership of "intellectual property" and the dangers associated on relying only on IP alone. I took this from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Roman_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Roman_Empire: > Byzantine historian Procopius stated that two Christian monks eventually uncovered the way of how silk was made. From this revelation spies were sent to steal the silkworm eggs, resulting in silk production in the Mediterranean.[18]
  • SkyMarshal 14y ago
    Fwiw, they also had their tea monopoly stolen by the British in the 1800s [1]. Additionally, the US turned a blind eye to its own theft of Europe's IP in the 1800s and early 1900s as we were developing. Not that we shouldn't defend against it when used against us, but it seems par for the course for developing nations to catch up this way. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Origin_and_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Origin_and_history
• neya 14y ago
  Step #1 to protect your private data - Have a separate computer, Ubuntu (or some secure OS) installed and disconnect it from the internet permanently. If you want to access any data, just go use the computer and save the data then and there. If you want to transfer data from this computer to another computer, just use a separate encrypted pen drive to transfer between files securely. If you don't want to use it, just turn it off. I'd love to see how the Chinese/Russian hackers can hack such a machine, unless they have physical access to them.
  • tomp 14y ago
    But what is a gigacorp to do? Make all their employees never use Windows/email/internet again during work hours, and run around the office building carrying USBs? Also, how can you be sure that Ubuntu is secure? It seems to me that there is a general problem with all *NIX systems with regards of how they (mis)manage permissions (either file permissions or OS permissions), and I'm very sad that not even the newly-developed OSes (Android) have not fixed that!
    • 16s 14y ago
      How does Unix mismanage file permissions? User, group, other and read, write execute has been around for decades. You won't find a simpler, more understandable system for file permissions. There are many more complex systems added on top of this, but the basics are simple and easy to manage.
      • tomp 14y ago
        All permissions are inherited by all user's processes, with no better granularity possible. That is a recipe for disaster and the core issue with most of our security problems. Android is a bit better, since it has specific permissions on a per-process level (or so it looks like), but you can't really manage them.
  • datr 14y ago
    Didn't stuxnet spread itself to air gaped machines through USB sticks?
• acabal 14y ago
  From a US perspective, foreign hackers are a threat--but I think mostly to companies and to individual cases of identity theft. I'd argue that a government spying on its own citizens is a much greater threat. If a Chinese hacker steals your identity, maybe you're out some (possibly significant) amount of money, and a lot of hassle. Your physical well-being is typically not threatened. If, however, the government reads through your email, listens in to your Skype calls, and then decides that you've committed some crime (and by virtue of living day-to-day in our hyper-criminalized society, almost all of us are guilty of some crime these days), you can be harrassed physically, legally, and financially for what might be the rest of your life by our crushing-revenge-driven legal system--you might even be imprisoned. Chinese hackers can't imprison you, or sue you until you choose to exit early. So from a regular person's perspective, we should be way more worried about what's going on at home.
• snowwrestler 14y ago
  Chinese hackers can be beaten. The reason they are so successful right now is that the average level of computer and network and security competence in the world is extremely low. In corporate America, the average employee is not sophisticated enough to resist spearfishing, which is how the vast majority of Chinese intrusions begin. But if the IT dept puts in place technologies or restrictions to protect against spearfishing (like quarantined browsers or blocking attachments), the average employees complain bitterly about the impact on their habits. And they don't like training. When management sides with employees, well-known security holes are left open. Even upgrading operating systems, which is one of the most effective tools against intrusions, is met with fear and anger at many organizations. Even without those front-line defenses, it is possible to find, stop, and eject the Chinese from corporate networks...but it is extremely time consuming and expensive to do so. Although they would never admit it, it's likely that many corporations make the calculation of "how much" intrusion they are willing to fight, and tacitly permit the rest. What they really want is not to stop the Chinese "at all costs", but to stop the Chinese for a given cost.
  • stcredzero 14y ago
    > Chinese hackers can be beaten. The reason they are so successful right now is that the average level of computer and network and security competence in the world is extremely low. I bet they're constantly having laughs at our expense. They must think of the US as a bunch of flubby overrated dimwits.
• specialist 14y ago
  Meanwhile... Touchscreens and centralized tabulators weren't nearly unreliable and insecure enough. The new thing is internet voting, meaning casting ballots via email. What could possibly go wrong? The motivator is the election vendors are pushing for a per-registered-voter fee business model. Election integrity be damned.
• martindale 14y ago
  If the U.S. government has deemed cyberattacks as "acts of war", and the superpowers are already lobbing such attacks at one another, I'd argue that we're already well into WWIII: https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/T4THntTxbRE https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/T4THntTx...
• suyash 14y ago
  @hooande: Sounds like you work for the Chinese Hackers. Anonymous > (beats) Chinese Hackers hands down any day. Ref: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/anonymous-hackers-chinese-army_n_2717352.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/anonymous-hackers-c...