9 ms·

Chinese hack U.S. Weather systems, satellite network

122 points by cryptoz 12y ago

ommunist 12y ago
But it was too late. Philae has landed to the comet.
- dz0ny 12y ago
  EU wins? :D
cryptoz 12y ago
The article does not discuss much the motivation they might have had for this hack, aside from the fact they're probably looking for gaps in general US systems. But I'm very curious about the economics of hacking another nation's weather service; China could give itself significant (and creepy) economic advantages my MITMing the data from the satellites. I wonder if they're considering things like this? Edit: Also, if they just wanted weather data, they should've signed up for http://pressurenet.io http://pressurenet.io ;)
- chiph 12y ago
  From a military standpoint, weather is super important. The D-Day landings at Normandy were delayed several times because of bad weather. http://www.history.com/news/the-weather-forecast-that-saved-d-day http://www.history.com/news/the-weather-forecast-that-saved-...
  - mpyne 12y ago
    It gets even more incredible. The landings would have been canceled for the day they actually happened, except that the meteorology officer in Eisenhower's staff predicted that there would be a short break in the bad weather sufficient for the landings to occur. Eisenhower rolled the dice and the weather did indeed hold up long enough for the invasion to occur. His opponent, Gen. Rommel, felt the weather was going to be so bad there was no way the invasion could commence so he was actually away from Normandy on D-Day to see his family.
- beachstartup 12y ago
  well, weather is pretty important when it comes to anything happening outside. knowing how much your opponent knows about the weather is also pretty important. ...and so is knowing where they want to know about the weather.
- cjslep 12y ago
  It is probably less Hollywood-like, such as predicting cloud cover over areas you'd be interested in using your satellites to look at. Or maybe they had a cyberhacking campaign and broke into as many US orgs as possible simultaneously, but each department discovers it at different times. Or, as others have said, maybe it isn't China at all but some other party?
- owenmarshall 12y ago
  > The article does not discuss much the motivation they might have had for this hack, aside from the fact they're probably looking for gaps in general US systems. NOAA is a branch of the US Department of Commerce - it's likely that is a relatively interesting target. And the NWS probably has data feeds that are based on non-publicly available information: maybe they've got some military satellite feeds out there. Who knows. But in reality I'd bet this was just a "cast many lines, see what we catch" operation. And most people probably discounted the risks of Chinese attacks against the weather service. I'd further bet that there are plenty of lesser-known government organizations out there that are being actively exploited right now.
  - lawnchair_larry 12y ago
    Yes, this is the most probable; see https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sv8IHkBtBEXjSW7WktEYg4EbAUHtVyXIZBrAGD3WR5Y/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sv8IHkBtBEXjSW7WktEY... Slides 12-25 in particular.
coldcode 12y ago
Yet another org too embarrassed to tell people they've been hacked, or more likely that they failed to do security at all.
- diminoten 12y ago
  Public companies risk being sued by their shareholders if they publicly disclose a breach, and as a consequence, the stock falls. If only there were laws in place that protected companies from things like this...
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Public companies risk running afoul of US data breach laws if they don't disclose a breach and customer data was potentially stolen. So it's a matter or piss off your stockholders or break the law. The only winning move is to have proper security before you get hacked.
    - diminoten 12y ago
      > Public companies risk running afoul of US data breach laws if they don't disclose a breach and customer data was potentially stolen. There are no US data breach laws, only state data breach laws, and they vary significantly from state to state, also in what constitutes "data", "breach", and "disclosure". So it's not just a matter of breaking the law or not. There are lots of situations where specific companies can not disclose publicly that they've been breached and not run afoul of the law. A good read - http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/security-breach-notification-laws.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-informat...
      - freehunter 12y ago
        I work in the Information Security field, so I'm aware. I don't mean US-wide data breach laws, I mean data breach laws in the US. Many states (100% of the states I support) require disclosure in a certain timeframe if customer data has been disclosed.
minimax 12y ago
The United States maintains two civil and one military program to provide meteorological imagery and data from spacecraft in polar and geostationary orbits around the Earth. The civil programs are managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the military program is managed by the Department of Defense. The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) is a unit of NOAA and is responsible for operating the civilian weather satellites (GOES and POES), distributing the satellite data and imagery, archiving the data, and planning for future systems. NESDIS also controls the Department of Defense constellation of polar orbiting weather satellites called Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which is similar to the civilian POES program. ... Due to the classified nature of the DMSP imagery and other data products, the DMSP downlink data is encrypted, and thus the direct readout system is not available to nonmilitary users. That all comes from this cool-as-hell PDF† about how to build a GOES/POES ground receiving station. Anyways the most obvious target here is probably the DMSP products, rather than, say, a Bruckheimer-esque plot to disrupt NOAA satellite imagery during the height of the Atlantic hurricane season. † http://noaasis.noaa.gov/NOAASIS/pubs/Users_Guide-Building_Receive_Stations_March_2009.pdf http://noaasis.noaa.gov/NOAASIS/pubs/Users_Guide-Building_Re...
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Of course if you were an evil genius bent on destroying the US by sending a massive hurricane into the eastern seaboard, your first step would be to disable the ability to see it coming ... :-)
  - bengali3 12y ago
    Nature. What better secret ally to start a war with?
    - electromagnetic 12y ago
      Cows. No one suspects something so docile and they outweigh us as a species by about 50%. We bred them to be tasty, but they were the ones using us.
crimzonrayne 12y ago
Am I the only person who's mind really wanted to read this as "Chinese hack U.S. Weather Control Systems"
Zikes 12y ago
http://i.imgur.com/sovN9Gp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sovN9Gp.jpg Is it just me, or is this apparently the reaction every time a US government or military system gets hacked by China? "Yep, we got hacked again. But we're just going to do our best to minimize the damage and pretend it never happened. No meaningful action will be taken against the perpetrators."
- gregschlom 12y ago
  China officials would probably deny that it was them if the US publicly accused them, saying it was some isolated hacker acting on its own, or maybe a foreign country routing its traffic through a VPN in China, AND they would point out that the US is doing exactly the same in China and elsewhere (Stuxnet, etc...).
- mikeash 12y ago
  What can they do? This certainly isn't something worth going to war over. Economic sanctions would just hurt everybody. What else?
- NeverEnough 12y ago
  yeah just like when it came out that the NSA was reading the emails of Germany's prime minister.
Someone1234 12y ago
I always appreciate how the US are able to pin every network compromise directly back to China. And not just China but the Chinese government in particular. Almost like VPNs, proxies, TOR, compromised machines, botnets, or similar do not exist in this arena and that a reverse DNS lookup will tell them 1337.mss.gov.cn. When the US talk about cybersecurity/"cyber wars" in general they're talking about something more akin to a Hollywood movie than anything you see on the ground on either side of the "fight." I'm extremely sceptical every time they claim Chinese responsibility. I am sceptical not because China wouldn't have the skills or motivation to do so (they do/would) but because they jump to these conclusions unrealistically quickly and if their adversary covered their tracks even modestly pointing fingers like that would be quite hard (e.g. send it through Russia).
- rrggrr 12y ago
  Having hacked Google, Juniper, Symantic, Morgan Stanley and countless USGOV sites - why not hack NOAA? Its not as if there will be any USGOV response. No sanctions. No demarche of which I'm aware. No counter-attack that has been publicized by China. Turning the other check is not a valid strategy in a prolonged conflict.
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    Exchange China with NSA and read your post again.
    - rrggrr 12y ago
      Done. Tepid feeling of unease was experienced that could be also be attributable to the grocery store sushi I had for lunch. To help put your mind at rest, USGOV bureaucrats oscillate across an ass-covering wave of incident driven threat detection peaks, and valleys of privacy right restrictions on their abilities. China, singling out just one state actor, operates unmodulated. There is a difference of level, accountability and transparency that makes your comparison invalid.
  - lazaroclapp 12y ago
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I don't know who this Wolf guy is, but he's absolutely right: if we are in the government, and we have a breach, and we're working on it, we have an obligation to fess up. (Unless there's some kind of counter-intelligence operations underway) We can all sit back in our comfy chairs and debate whether it really is China or not, whether various networks are secure or not, or how much various agencies can store (and the dangers associated with them storing things). But we can only do that if we have recent and valid information about what's going on. Good public policy decisions depend on an informed electorate. This kind of situation is not the place to be covering up your mistakes.
- neolefty 12y ago
  I think you're right that an open attitude towards security breaches is essential for a healthy security ecosystem. However, in practice, fessing up in public during an investigation will rarely happen. Security incident responses are some of the most-hushed processes, even inside otherwise open organizations. That's because you want to find and close the vulnerabilities before publicizing them. Otherwise, by publicizing, you invite attacks that will (a) multiply the noise you have to sift through to complete the investigation and (b) potentially create new incidents, at a time when you are already in a crisis (the current attack & investigation). So most security departments will only talk about what happened after the fact, when it's all been tidied up again. But even then, the habit of secrecy has already been established. It's a constant struggle to bring openness to a process where secrecy is a short-term advantage. If you want an informative accounting of what happened, I think you need to add it to the incident response process. For example (simplified for illustration) 1. Notice an intrusion 2. Capture information (logs, vulnerabilities used, etc) 3. Secure systems that have been compromised 4. Prevent future intrusions within the organization Need to modify 4 (or add 5) 5. Publish to help other orgs also prevent intrusions. But other orgs may hate you for that, because in the process of publishing, you have exposed their lax practices that (in hindsight) used to be your lax practices ...
healthisevil 12y ago
What about American cyber attacks on countries around the world ?
roylez 12y ago
As a Chinese I would prefer to believe our government is behind this. Do you know Beijing (or even the whole country) has a serious smog issue which was first uncovered by American embassy in Beijing? The incident makes the government lose their trust in public, and for quite some time people only want to trust forecast from NOAA in stead of Beijing. If Chinese government hacked NOAA, it would be out of their intention to contain domestic reactions. Actually, our government has greater problems at home than abroad.
- freehunter 12y ago
  >Do you know Beijing has a serious smog issue which was first uncovered by American embassy in Beijing? So no one in the Chinese government or citizens had noticed that they can't see across the street until the Americans mentioned it?
  - roylez 12y ago
    People could see the smog for sure, but official forecast would report nothing unusual or indicating the hazard to people's lives. It was till Americans embassy spoke it out that the majority realised we breathe highly polluted air.
    - yzzxy 12y ago
      The official forecast in China is presumably controlled by the government. That's what makes it "official". You can't possibly argue that because the US is not publicly shaming the Chinese government into release accurate heath-relevant information to its citizens, that that same government has the right to hack US systems to determine weather information. If that is actually what occurred.
- mknits 12y ago
  Don't Chinese citizens dream of making their country a two-party or multiparty democracy like US or India, respectively? This one-party autocratic rule will one day make people insane.
ajmurmann 12y ago
I never will understand how this spying stuff always is allowed to happen. I know every government does is, but I find it unbelievably dishonest. What kind of relationship is that? I would intuitively see any spying as an act of war, especially if supposedly friendly countries do it.
- Redoubts 12y ago
  Yeah, but what are they going to do about it. Sanctions that hurt you just as much? Retaliate in kind? War? I'm not sure its understood yet what the appropriate response should be, or what the bounds of the consequences are. A lot of people worry about Government sponsored hacking taking the gloves off, and fucking with commercial infrastructure directly and relentlessly. The amount of leaks and compromises we see today suggests this could be economically catastrophic.
thecoolkid 12y ago
Up Next: NSA hackers hack into US Weather systems arctic cyclone bomb a threat to national security intercepted Doppler effects
japaget 12y ago
See also this article on the impact this hack had on weather forecasts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/11/12/weather-satellite-data-hack-and-outage-why-this-matters-for-forecasting/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
gesman 12y ago
At least now they have an excuse for the reasons of poor weather prediction in spite of huge budget.
swframe 12y ago
I don't know who is really doing this or what the impact will be but let's pretend for a moment that the chinese government is responsible. They are largely funding our government. We need each other. I wonder if a serious problem with the world is due to secrets that allow some to have power over others. For example, a company with a patent on a drug that costs $80K has power over those who will die without it. If you can't afford it, have you seriously harmed the company if you violate the patent to manufacture it in a 3rd world country for people who could never pay for the drug. When is human life more important that a company's right to a patent (or information)? The chinese have a serious problem in the form of several hundred million people who need to be moved out of poverty. To help them get there they seem to be mining a precious resource: information in 1st world countries. Is this different (or worse) than 1st world countries mining precious resources in the 3rd world? What is the net result? China will use this information to make itself wealthy enough to buy more of our goods? China will acquire the ability to make our goods cheaper than we can make them and force us to work harder? I'm not saying "stealing" is "right" but it seems to be an important way all 1st world countries became richer. The notion of "right" is suspect given that history is written by the winner.
- jzwinck 12y ago
  Your comparison with "mining precious resources in the 3rd world" is interesting, because China is doing that too: http://en.starafrica.com/news/mozambique-chinese-firms-clinch-mining-deals.html http://en.starafrica.com/news/mozambique-chinese-firms-clinc... http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Data/Africa_file/Manualreport/cia_08.html http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Data/Africa_file/Manualreport/c... My experience five years ago was that regular African people were not too keen on the Chinese mining companies that had set up shop. But perhaps there was not enough competition to mine more locally.
sean_grant 12y ago
Do we know what kind of data was accessed in these attacks? I wonder what kind of weather data can be so important to be kept secret that they must disrupt the service and seal off everything. Were they storing other data on these servers?

122 points by cryptoz 12y ago

ommunist 12y ago

But it was too late. Philae has landed to the comet.

dz0ny 12y ago
EU wins? :D

cryptoz 12y ago

The article does not discuss much the motivation they might have had for this hack, aside from the fact they're probably looking for gaps in general US systems. But I'm very curious about the economics of hacking another nation's weather service; China could give itself significant (and creepy) economic advantages my MITMing the data from the satellites. I wonder if they're considering things like this? Edit: Also, if they just wanted weather data, they should've signed up for http://pressurenet.io http://pressurenet.io ;)

chiph 12y ago
From a military standpoint, weather is super important. The D-Day landings at Normandy were delayed several times because of bad weather. http://www.history.com/news/the-weather-forecast-that-saved-d-day http://www.history.com/news/the-weather-forecast-that-saved-...
- mpyne 12y ago
  It gets even more incredible. The landings would have been canceled for the day they actually happened, except that the meteorology officer in Eisenhower's staff predicted that there would be a short break in the bad weather sufficient for the landings to occur. Eisenhower rolled the dice and the weather did indeed hold up long enough for the invasion to occur. His opponent, Gen. Rommel, felt the weather was going to be so bad there was no way the invasion could commence so he was actually away from Normandy on D-Day to see his family.
beachstartup 12y ago
well, weather is pretty important when it comes to anything happening outside. knowing how much your opponent knows about the weather is also pretty important. ...and so is knowing where they want to know about the weather.
cjslep 12y ago
It is probably less Hollywood-like, such as predicting cloud cover over areas you'd be interested in using your satellites to look at. Or maybe they had a cyberhacking campaign and broke into as many US orgs as possible simultaneously, but each department discovers it at different times. Or, as others have said, maybe it isn't China at all but some other party?
owenmarshall 12y ago
> The article does not discuss much the motivation they might have had for this hack, aside from the fact they're probably looking for gaps in general US systems. NOAA is a branch of the US Department of Commerce - it's likely that is a relatively interesting target. And the NWS probably has data feeds that are based on non-publicly available information: maybe they've got some military satellite feeds out there. Who knows. But in reality I'd bet this was just a "cast many lines, see what we catch" operation. And most people probably discounted the risks of Chinese attacks against the weather service. I'd further bet that there are plenty of lesser-known government organizations out there that are being actively exploited right now.
- lawnchair_larry 12y ago
  Yes, this is the most probable; see https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sv8IHkBtBEXjSW7WktEYg4EbAUHtVyXIZBrAGD3WR5Y/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sv8IHkBtBEXjSW7WktEY... Slides 12-25 in particular.

coldcode 12y ago

Yet another org too embarrassed to tell people they've been hacked, or more likely that they failed to do security at all.

diminoten 12y ago
Public companies risk being sued by their shareholders if they publicly disclose a breach, and as a consequence, the stock falls. If only there were laws in place that protected companies from things like this...
- freehunter 12y ago
  Public companies risk running afoul of US data breach laws if they don't disclose a breach and customer data was potentially stolen. So it's a matter or piss off your stockholders or break the law. The only winning move is to have proper security before you get hacked.
  - diminoten 12y ago
    > Public companies risk running afoul of US data breach laws if they don't disclose a breach and customer data was potentially stolen. There are no US data breach laws, only state data breach laws, and they vary significantly from state to state, also in what constitutes "data", "breach", and "disclosure". So it's not just a matter of breaking the law or not. There are lots of situations where specific companies can not disclose publicly that they've been breached and not run afoul of the law. A good read - http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/security-breach-notification-laws.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-informat...
    - freehunter 12y ago
      I work in the Information Security field, so I'm aware. I don't mean US-wide data breach laws, I mean data breach laws in the US. Many states (100% of the states I support) require disclosure in a certain timeframe if customer data has been disclosed.

minimax 12y ago

The United States maintains two civil and one military program to provide meteorological imagery and data from spacecraft in polar and geostationary orbits around the Earth. The civil programs are managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the military program is managed by the Department of Defense. The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) is a unit of NOAA and is responsible for operating the civilian weather satellites (GOES and POES), distributing the satellite data and imagery, archiving the data, and planning for future systems. NESDIS also controls the Department of Defense constellation of polar orbiting weather satellites called Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which is similar to the civilian POES program. ... Due to the classified nature of the DMSP imagery and other data products, the DMSP downlink data is encrypted, and thus the direct readout system is not available to nonmilitary users. That all comes from this cool-as-hell PDF† about how to build a GOES/POES ground receiving station. Anyways the most obvious target here is probably the DMSP products, rather than, say, a Bruckheimer-esque plot to disrupt NOAA satellite imagery during the height of the Atlantic hurricane season. † http://noaasis.noaa.gov/NOAASIS/pubs/Users_Guide-Building_Receive_Stations_March_2009.pdf http://noaasis.noaa.gov/NOAASIS/pubs/Users_Guide-Building_Re...

ChuckMcM 12y ago
Of course if you were an evil genius bent on destroying the US by sending a massive hurricane into the eastern seaboard, your first step would be to disable the ability to see it coming ... :-)
- bengali3 12y ago
  Nature. What better secret ally to start a war with?
  - electromagnetic 12y ago
    Cows. No one suspects something so docile and they outweigh us as a species by about 50%. We bred them to be tasty, but they were the ones using us.

crimzonrayne 12y ago

Am I the only person who's mind really wanted to read this as "Chinese hack U.S. Weather Control Systems"

Zikes 12y ago

http://i.imgur.com/sovN9Gp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sovN9Gp.jpg Is it just me, or is this apparently the reaction every time a US government or military system gets hacked by China? "Yep, we got hacked again. But we're just going to do our best to minimize the damage and pretend it never happened. No meaningful action will be taken against the perpetrators."

gregschlom 12y ago
China officials would probably deny that it was them if the US publicly accused them, saying it was some isolated hacker acting on its own, or maybe a foreign country routing its traffic through a VPN in China, AND they would point out that the US is doing exactly the same in China and elsewhere (Stuxnet, etc...).
mikeash 12y ago
What can they do? This certainly isn't something worth going to war over. Economic sanctions would just hurt everybody. What else?
NeverEnough 12y ago
yeah just like when it came out that the NSA was reading the emails of Germany's prime minister.

Someone1234 12y ago

I always appreciate how the US are able to pin every network compromise directly back to China. And not just China but the Chinese government in particular. Almost like VPNs, proxies, TOR, compromised machines, botnets, or similar do not exist in this arena and that a reverse DNS lookup will tell them 1337.mss.gov.cn. When the US talk about cybersecurity/"cyber wars" in general they're talking about something more akin to a Hollywood movie than anything you see on the ground on either side of the "fight." I'm extremely sceptical every time they claim Chinese responsibility. I am sceptical not because China wouldn't have the skills or motivation to do so (they do/would) but because they jump to these conclusions unrealistically quickly and if their adversary covered their tracks even modestly pointing fingers like that would be quite hard (e.g. send it through Russia).

rrggrr 12y ago
Having hacked Google, Juniper, Symantic, Morgan Stanley and countless USGOV sites - why not hack NOAA? Its not as if there will be any USGOV response. No sanctions. No demarche of which I'm aware. No counter-attack that has been publicized by China. Turning the other check is not a valid strategy in a prolonged conflict.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  Exchange China with NSA and read your post again.
  - rrggrr 12y ago
    Done. Tepid feeling of unease was experienced that could be also be attributable to the grocery store sushi I had for lunch. To help put your mind at rest, USGOV bureaucrats oscillate across an ass-covering wave of incident driven threat detection peaks, and valleys of privacy right restrictions on their abilities. China, singling out just one state actor, operates unmodulated. There is a difference of level, accountability and transparency that makes your comparison invalid.
- lazaroclapp 12y ago

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I don't know who this Wolf guy is, but he's absolutely right: if we are in the government, and we have a breach, and we're working on it, we have an obligation to fess up. (Unless there's some kind of counter-intelligence operations underway) We can all sit back in our comfy chairs and debate whether it really is China or not, whether various networks are secure or not, or how much various agencies can store (and the dangers associated with them storing things). But we can only do that if we have recent and valid information about what's going on. Good public policy decisions depend on an informed electorate. This kind of situation is not the place to be covering up your mistakes.

neolefty 12y ago
I think you're right that an open attitude towards security breaches is essential for a healthy security ecosystem. However, in practice, fessing up in public during an investigation will rarely happen. Security incident responses are some of the most-hushed processes, even inside otherwise open organizations. That's because you want to find and close the vulnerabilities before publicizing them. Otherwise, by publicizing, you invite attacks that will (a) multiply the noise you have to sift through to complete the investigation and (b) potentially create new incidents, at a time when you are already in a crisis (the current attack & investigation). So most security departments will only talk about what happened after the fact, when it's all been tidied up again. But even then, the habit of secrecy has already been established. It's a constant struggle to bring openness to a process where secrecy is a short-term advantage. If you want an informative accounting of what happened, I think you need to add it to the incident response process. For example (simplified for illustration) 1. Notice an intrusion 2. Capture information (logs, vulnerabilities used, etc) 3. Secure systems that have been compromised 4. Prevent future intrusions within the organization Need to modify 4 (or add 5) 5. Publish to help other orgs also prevent intrusions. But other orgs may hate you for that, because in the process of publishing, you have exposed their lax practices that (in hindsight) used to be your lax practices ...

healthisevil 12y ago

What about American cyber attacks on countries around the world ?

roylez 12y ago

As a Chinese I would prefer to believe our government is behind this. Do you know Beijing (or even the whole country) has a serious smog issue which was first uncovered by American embassy in Beijing? The incident makes the government lose their trust in public, and for quite some time people only want to trust forecast from NOAA in stead of Beijing. If Chinese government hacked NOAA, it would be out of their intention to contain domestic reactions. Actually, our government has greater problems at home than abroad.

freehunter 12y ago
>Do you know Beijing has a serious smog issue which was first uncovered by American embassy in Beijing? So no one in the Chinese government or citizens had noticed that they can't see across the street until the Americans mentioned it?
- roylez 12y ago
  People could see the smog for sure, but official forecast would report nothing unusual or indicating the hazard to people's lives. It was till Americans embassy spoke it out that the majority realised we breathe highly polluted air.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    The official forecast in China is presumably controlled by the government. That's what makes it "official". You can't possibly argue that because the US is not publicly shaming the Chinese government into release accurate heath-relevant information to its citizens, that that same government has the right to hack US systems to determine weather information. If that is actually what occurred.
mknits 12y ago
Don't Chinese citizens dream of making their country a two-party or multiparty democracy like US or India, respectively? This one-party autocratic rule will one day make people insane.

ajmurmann 12y ago

I never will understand how this spying stuff always is allowed to happen. I know every government does is, but I find it unbelievably dishonest. What kind of relationship is that? I would intuitively see any spying as an act of war, especially if supposedly friendly countries do it.

Redoubts 12y ago
Yeah, but what are they going to do about it. Sanctions that hurt you just as much? Retaliate in kind? War? I'm not sure its understood yet what the appropriate response should be, or what the bounds of the consequences are. A lot of people worry about Government sponsored hacking taking the gloves off, and fucking with commercial infrastructure directly and relentlessly. The amount of leaks and compromises we see today suggests this could be economically catastrophic.

thecoolkid 12y ago

Up Next: NSA hackers hack into US Weather systems arctic cyclone bomb a threat to national security intercepted Doppler effects

japaget 12y ago

See also this article on the impact this hack had on weather forecasts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/11/12/weather-satellite-data-hack-and-outage-why-this-matters-for-forecasting/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

gesman 12y ago

At least now they have an excuse for the reasons of poor weather prediction in spite of huge budget.

swframe 12y ago

I don't know who is really doing this or what the impact will be but let's pretend for a moment that the chinese government is responsible. They are largely funding our government. We need each other. I wonder if a serious problem with the world is due to secrets that allow some to have power over others. For example, a company with a patent on a drug that costs $80K has power over those who will die without it. If you can't afford it, have you seriously harmed the company if you violate the patent to manufacture it in a 3rd world country for people who could never pay for the drug. When is human life more important that a company's right to a patent (or information)? The chinese have a serious problem in the form of several hundred million people who need to be moved out of poverty. To help them get there they seem to be mining a precious resource: information in 1st world countries. Is this different (or worse) than 1st world countries mining precious resources in the 3rd world? What is the net result? China will use this information to make itself wealthy enough to buy more of our goods? China will acquire the ability to make our goods cheaper than we can make them and force us to work harder? I'm not saying "stealing" is "right" but it seems to be an important way all 1st world countries became richer. The notion of "right" is suspect given that history is written by the winner.

jzwinck 12y ago
Your comparison with "mining precious resources in the 3rd world" is interesting, because China is doing that too: http://en.starafrica.com/news/mozambique-chinese-firms-clinch-mining-deals.html http://en.starafrica.com/news/mozambique-chinese-firms-clinc... http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Data/Africa_file/Manualreport/cia_08.html http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Data/Africa_file/Manualreport/c... My experience five years ago was that regular African people were not too keen on the Chinese mining companies that had set up shop. But perhaps there was not enough competition to mine more locally.

sean_grant 12y ago

Do we know what kind of data was accessed in these attacks? I wonder what kind of weather data can be so important to be kept secret that they must disrupt the service and seal off everything. Were they storing other data on these servers?