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Britain's GCHQ hacked Belgium's telco Belgacom

• sasvari 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416660
  • anthonyb 13y ago
    Which apparently has been flagged off of the front page.
    • eliot_sykes 13y ago
      Any idea why it'd be flagged?
      • eli 13y ago
        People perhaps fatigued by constant spying mini-revelations
        • tripzilch 13y ago
          "mini" revelations ... if you're an American. Unbelievable. When it's the NSA spying on US citizens, everybody's paying attention, and US people scramble to point out that the EU isn't much better, either (which we knew already because it wasn't kept secret from us in the first place. blame us for the apathy, I applaud the US's (relative) outrage). And then something like this comes out, the UK hacking a neighbour EU country, and people are suddenly "huh we're tired of this news". Self-centred is more what I'd call it.
        • Xylakant 13y ago
          "mini" is certainly not the right word to use if the provider in question "hosts many of the most important European Union institutions, universities and corporations, as well as NATO."
    • pvnick 13y ago
      I'm getting tired of the knee-jerk tendency for a small group of people to flag these extremely critical revelations. Yesterday the post about the mass rally on Washington was flagged to the bottom and eventually kicked off the front page. A recent poll revealed overwhelming support for more, not less reports on these spying stories, and yet a vocal minority is able to disregard the community's wishes and ruin things for everyone. I don't know how this can be solved other than perhaps intense moderation to unflag everything regarding these revelations and let their popularity be determined solely by votes.
      • tomjen3 13y ago
        This place is only incidentally run as a semi-democracy. The goal is not to get the stuff on the front page that the most people want but the stuff that satisfy peoples intellectual curiosity. If you want a completely democratically run internet forum, create your own subreddit or on www.reddit.com. Incidentally Hacker News was made partially as a response to the decline of the general reddit communities and with the hope of addressing at least some of their failures - such as relying too much on democracy.
      • spangled 13y ago
        I'm getting tired of the knee-jerk tendency for a small group of people to flag these extremely critical revelations. The "knee-jerk" comes from the tendency of people to submit lots and lots of less important stories on the same handful of topics, rather than a few good ones. Remember when the front page was nothing but Erlang? Or nothing but Steve Jobs eulogies? For people that come for quality rather than quantity, it harms the signal to noise ratio. Submitting even more just exacerbates the problem, without creating better discussions (more threads != better threads) in exchange. As tomjen3 suggests: find or create your own subreddit. Subreddits themselves exist because this same problem afflicted Reddit. Edit: I'm sorry if I offended somebody. I'm simply trying to propose a solution for people that feel they aren't seeing the stories they want to see on HN.
    • freehunter 13y ago
      So you could call this a "false flag" operation?
• filipmaertens 13y ago
  Through excitement this was erroneously posted and contains the same article of Der Spiegel as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416660
• bsullivan01 13y ago
  Safe to say that they hacked every {country}com they could. That's not personal, just business.
  • unionpivo 13y ago
    To GCHQ it may be business as usual, but if I were telco owner/admin/user I would be pissed. After all virus writers/crackers/spammers are just business too. Just because its government that hacks you doesn't make it any better, I believe it makes it worse.
    • freehunter 13y ago
      I've been trying to get my bosses on board with offensive security at work, where if I see someone trying to attack us I want the right to attack them back. Kind of turning the blue team into the red team. Imagine if you did that and then found out the attackers that you just counter-hacked were actually the government and now you're being arrested? --I know it's illegal (except if a big company like Microsoft or a government agency like the FBI does it). It's the dream of every information security professional though.
      • unionpivo 13y ago
        Yes. You should be arrested. Counter hacking is just hacking, the only difference is how you pick your target. And you never know, maybe the owner of the originating system was just another victim. (Hacker breaks in computer A, then precedes to hack computer B leaving trace back to computer A, not the hacker) It is also against the law in most of developed world.
      • filipmaertens 13y ago
        Counterattacking is a big no-no in most countries, so I would stay from that offensive security stuff. Unless of course, you're working for a government, in which case you need to look at the conventions of warfare and see if you can declare war on another country where the attack allegedly originated from ;-))) Tough sell :-)
  • 13y ago
• rwmj 13y ago
  Interestingly, this has not been reported in the UK.
  • da_n 13y ago
    There is a gag order on the media against any reporting of GCHQ. Ministry of Truth is in full effect in the UK right now.
    • tombrossman 13y ago
      Not disputing that there is some 'voluntary' suppression of facts by the media but a quick search of BBC news shows 5 stories in the last 10 days. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=GCHQ http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=GCHQ
      • eliot_sykes 13y ago
        In the UK, we aren't having any real public debate about the security services, largely because the homegrown news organisations aren't giving the issues the attention they deserve. I don't know what would happen to them if they took a stand against a D-Notice. (BTW, the 2nd result on that BBC news search is more like a job ad for GCHQ) (Edited to remove my erroneous claim that D-notices aren't voluntary, turns out they are, though hardly any media orgs. go against them)
      • da_n 13y ago
        Guess I should have been more specific, it is an official D-Notice by the MOD relating to Tempura: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-media-censor-surveillance-security http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-m... http://order-order.com/2013/06/08/d-notice-june-7-2013/ http://order-order.com/2013/06/08/d-notice-june-7-2013/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
  • eliot_sykes 13y ago
    D-Notices limit what the news organisations can report on here in the UK. Here's some correspondence with the BBC that shows what's going on. The BBC acknowledge they have been asked to talk to the government before reporting on anything to do with the recent security revelations: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/reporting_on_gchqs_tempora_progr https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/reporting_on_gchqs_te...