4 ms·

New Chinese Cyberattacks: What’s to Be Done?

29 points by vincvinc 12y ago

JohnTHaller 12y ago
Stop using Baidu for one.
- FreakyT 12y ago
  One of the key effects of China's firewall has been to ensure that China has its own plethora of native internet services -- yet the latest attacks will probably ensure that no one outside of China uses those services. It seems like the perpetrators of the attack are hurting Chinese businesses more than anything else.
  - virmundi 12y ago
    Yes and the same can be said for the NSA and US networking tech. (Un)Fortunately, people will continue using what works. If Baidu has a benefit, then people will use it. Perhaps it can strengthen it to say no to the Chinese government in these types of attacks.
    - JohnTHaller 12y ago
      Outside of China, using Google Adsense or Analytics won't make your website visitors the unwitting participants in cyberwarfare. Using Baidu ads or analytics, your website visitors can and will be used by China to attack a website of their choosing.
  - unchocked 12y ago
    The effects that you mention seem to be the purpose of these attacks. Like the Great Firewall, the Great Cannon serves to keep the Chinese Internet and therefore population isolated from the outside world. Their Politburo is a lot less concerned with losing market share abroad than with losing mindshare domestically.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Could you clarify a little? If you are talking about Github in particular, wasn't Baidu an innocent party who had their scripts man-in-the-middled by the so called "Great Firewall of China" to trick user's browsers into being part of a DDoS? It is no different than if the Google Analytics script got hijacked in the West.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    The difference is that China has a Great Firewall and now a "Great Cannon". China has demonstrated that they are willing to use it to weaponize Baidu against github merely for hosting content China don't like. Now that this is known and demonstrated, anyone outside China that uses Baidu's analytics or ad product would be behaving irresponsibly. Basically, you can't trust any traffic going through the great firewall, so you absolutely should not link to a Javascript hosted within China as a non-China-based business. Within China, China can weaponize Baidu, Google, or anything else they choose. That's the nature of their internet connectivity and their ownership of CNNIC, which recently issued certificates that can be used to impersonate Google, Facebook, etc.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Decentralize the web. Much harder to DDoS it this way and also harder to censor it.
- skymt 12y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by "decentralize" here, because the web to me is the prime example of a successful decentralized system.
  - swsieber 12y ago
    Moreso than decentralized web I think he means decentralized site. Most sites are served by just a few servers. I think bittorrent is working on this with a project called Maelstrom: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-internet-we-build-next/ http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-...
    - skymt 12y ago
      This is a cool problem, and while others have worked on it before (e.g. Freenet), Maelstrom could be a significant step forward in usability by using the look and feel of a normal browser. But these systems deal with static content. Distributed hash tables are a well-studied solution. Providing the same advantages of magic, trust-free, peer-to-peer replication to a dynamic (interactive and frequently-modified) site like Github is a much cooler and harder problem, and I'm not aware of anyone trying to solve it. Intuitively it feels impossible to create such a site without a distinct set of trusted nodes doing the work.
- marvel_boy 12y ago
  It happens that "web" is already one of the most decentralized things in our world.
task_queue 12y ago
We could dramatize what's been going on for decades as something new and urgent and then pass tomes of legislation handing trillions to the DHS and intelligence agencies.
- jqm 12y ago
  Oh just THINK of the contracting opportunities!
fredkbloggs 12y ago
The first step is to recognize that this is not a technical issue but a political/diplomatic/military one. The second requirement for anything useful to happen is for Western governments to find some balls and start standing up to China in general. With those two changes in place, the groundwork is laid for a meaningful engagement on this specific issue. The likelihood of either happening is nil, so expect China to continue on its current trajectory. Eventually it will come down to whether Western corporations are willing to allow their governments to disconnect China from the rest of the world. Some will demand it, tired of incessant attacks; others will lobby fiercely against it, greedy for what they see as a profitable place to do business. Like so many issues in the West today, it will come down to one group of corporate lobbyists against another, both pushing for deeply suboptimal outcomes relative to what a sane world would have imposed years earlier.
rst 12y ago
Much of this commentary was written while the attack was still in progress; it presumes that Github would be forced to fold, and goes on to assess tye consequences. This has been... overtaken by events.
pnathan 12y ago
A few thoughts dredged up: - Coldly, the US citizens and companies broadly views the internet as a way to make cash, and generally will pursue that. - Free speech concerns and the decentralized power of the internet are of interest to "damn fool idealists", as Kenobi might say. Not your major business powers. Google's play is very revealing here... - China is extremely interested in their own sovereignty and control of the China-sphere, with soft power exercised elsewhere. The obvious easy way forward is for companies to capitulate to Beijing and let the cash flow. This is likely the most common occurrence today. Some companies will take the higher road, particularly the more idealistic ones with fat cash bags. The argument that the State department should be involved is probably the correct one, but one wonders exactly what leverage can be applied, since China has spent decades building local apps and infrastructure. I would be extremely interested in tokenadult's take on this, as he is very familiar with China.
theophrastus 12y ago
The Chinese view is that an attempt to subvert their control, which typically amounts to some form of censorship, makes you a viable target. They are following: best defense is an offense. (It's interesting to compare this to the legal 'attacks' from European demands on google "freedom to be forgotten" and restraints on freedom of speech surrounding holocaust denial) One suggestion is to daily and publicly publish, in a simple format, trans-national internet attacks and to link those to imposed trade tariffs. Following outrage and denials, this might result in either complete Balkanization or a retreat to more defensive measures (e.g. the great internet wall of china)
xnull6guest 12y ago
New Everyone Cyberattacks: What's to Be Done? Four things, each with their own time horizon and in parallel. 1. Norms for cyber warfare and international cyber activity to be developed. (The US may not be able to lead this post-Snowden, but they should try and should be involved.) 2. Cooperation on international standards, development and funding in cyberspace to improve and prove the security of networks, protocols, hardware and software. 3. Deescalation of cyber capabilities and activities. These exercises can be expressed in many ways such as 'cyber-free days' where nations show their good intentions by withholding operations in good faith. 4. International investment, development, data sharing and standardization of forensics capabilities to squeeze the attribution problem. This may be done in lockstep with protocol development. But at its root there are three reasons nations hack one another: intelligence, intellectual property, sabotage. Whatever deterrents and legal frameworks are in place will need to be as or more compelling than the motivations for cyberactivity. Whatever can be done to limit what can be gained by intelligence, sabotage and IP theft will in turn limit cyber activity. So a fifth item would be to reexamine and double down on the international peace keeping frameworks that discourage the listed above.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  >But at its root there are three reasons nations hack one another: intelligence, intellectual property, sabotage. Or in this case to block their own citizens access to information that is available worldwide.
  - xnull6guest 12y ago
    Meh - that's not why there are cyber attacks. I mean - if you take the attacks on greatfire and SONY they are retaliations for propaganda operations. 'Information' available around the globe and 'narrative' around the globe are not easily disentangled. The US also faces these challenges, and uses a series of tactics (mostly Sunstein style shilling) of dealing with these issues (but also limited forms of censorship partnerships). Namely these cyber activities are not censorship in the most obvious and indisputable form, as you suggest. My argument above can be thought of a way to deal with the international problem of cybermilitary attacks. Diplomacy products are another, separate, issue.

29 points by vincvinc 12y ago

JohnTHaller 12y ago

Stop using Baidu for one.

FreakyT 12y ago
One of the key effects of China's firewall has been to ensure that China has its own plethora of native internet services -- yet the latest attacks will probably ensure that no one outside of China uses those services. It seems like the perpetrators of the attack are hurting Chinese businesses more than anything else.
- virmundi 12y ago
  Yes and the same can be said for the NSA and US networking tech. (Un)Fortunately, people will continue using what works. If Baidu has a benefit, then people will use it. Perhaps it can strengthen it to say no to the Chinese government in these types of attacks.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    Outside of China, using Google Adsense or Analytics won't make your website visitors the unwitting participants in cyberwarfare. Using Baidu ads or analytics, your website visitors can and will be used by China to attack a website of their choosing.
- unchocked 12y ago
  The effects that you mention seem to be the purpose of these attacks. Like the Great Firewall, the Great Cannon serves to keep the Chinese Internet and therefore population isolated from the outside world. Their Politburo is a lot less concerned with losing market share abroad than with losing mindshare domestically.
Someone1234 12y ago
Could you clarify a little? If you are talking about Github in particular, wasn't Baidu an innocent party who had their scripts man-in-the-middled by the so called "Great Firewall of China" to trick user's browsers into being part of a DDoS? It is no different than if the Google Analytics script got hijacked in the West.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  The difference is that China has a Great Firewall and now a "Great Cannon". China has demonstrated that they are willing to use it to weaponize Baidu against github merely for hosting content China don't like. Now that this is known and demonstrated, anyone outside China that uses Baidu's analytics or ad product would be behaving irresponsibly. Basically, you can't trust any traffic going through the great firewall, so you absolutely should not link to a Javascript hosted within China as a non-China-based business. Within China, China can weaponize Baidu, Google, or anything else they choose. That's the nature of their internet connectivity and their ownership of CNNIC, which recently issued certificates that can be used to impersonate Google, Facebook, etc.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Decentralize the web. Much harder to DDoS it this way and also harder to censor it.

skymt 12y ago
I'm curious what you mean by "decentralize" here, because the web to me is the prime example of a successful decentralized system.
- swsieber 12y ago
  Moreso than decentralized web I think he means decentralized site. Most sites are served by just a few servers. I think bittorrent is working on this with a project called Maelstrom: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-internet-we-build-next/ http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-...
  - skymt 12y ago
    This is a cool problem, and while others have worked on it before (e.g. Freenet), Maelstrom could be a significant step forward in usability by using the look and feel of a normal browser. But these systems deal with static content. Distributed hash tables are a well-studied solution. Providing the same advantages of magic, trust-free, peer-to-peer replication to a dynamic (interactive and frequently-modified) site like Github is a much cooler and harder problem, and I'm not aware of anyone trying to solve it. Intuitively it feels impossible to create such a site without a distinct set of trusted nodes doing the work.
marvel_boy 12y ago
It happens that "web" is already one of the most decentralized things in our world.

task_queue 12y ago

We could dramatize what's been going on for decades as something new and urgent and then pass tomes of legislation handing trillions to the DHS and intelligence agencies.

jqm 12y ago
Oh just THINK of the contracting opportunities!

fredkbloggs 12y ago

The first step is to recognize that this is not a technical issue but a political/diplomatic/military one. The second requirement for anything useful to happen is for Western governments to find some balls and start standing up to China in general. With those two changes in place, the groundwork is laid for a meaningful engagement on this specific issue. The likelihood of either happening is nil, so expect China to continue on its current trajectory. Eventually it will come down to whether Western corporations are willing to allow their governments to disconnect China from the rest of the world. Some will demand it, tired of incessant attacks; others will lobby fiercely against it, greedy for what they see as a profitable place to do business. Like so many issues in the West today, it will come down to one group of corporate lobbyists against another, both pushing for deeply suboptimal outcomes relative to what a sane world would have imposed years earlier.

rst 12y ago

Much of this commentary was written while the attack was still in progress; it presumes that Github would be forced to fold, and goes on to assess tye consequences. This has been... overtaken by events.

pnathan 12y ago

A few thoughts dredged up: - Coldly, the US citizens and companies broadly views the internet as a way to make cash, and generally will pursue that. - Free speech concerns and the decentralized power of the internet are of interest to "damn fool idealists", as Kenobi might say. Not your major business powers. Google's play is very revealing here... - China is extremely interested in their own sovereignty and control of the China-sphere, with soft power exercised elsewhere. The obvious easy way forward is for companies to capitulate to Beijing and let the cash flow. This is likely the most common occurrence today. Some companies will take the higher road, particularly the more idealistic ones with fat cash bags. The argument that the State department should be involved is probably the correct one, but one wonders exactly what leverage can be applied, since China has spent decades building local apps and infrastructure. I would be extremely interested in tokenadult's take on this, as he is very familiar with China.

theophrastus 12y ago

The Chinese view is that an attempt to subvert their control, which typically amounts to some form of censorship, makes you a viable target. They are following: best defense is an offense. (It's interesting to compare this to the legal 'attacks' from European demands on google "freedom to be forgotten" and restraints on freedom of speech surrounding holocaust denial) One suggestion is to daily and publicly publish, in a simple format, trans-national internet attacks and to link those to imposed trade tariffs. Following outrage and denials, this might result in either complete Balkanization or a retreat to more defensive measures (e.g. the great internet wall of china)

xnull6guest 12y ago

New Everyone Cyberattacks: What's to Be Done? Four things, each with their own time horizon and in parallel. 1. Norms for cyber warfare and international cyber activity to be developed. (The US may not be able to lead this post-Snowden, but they should try and should be involved.) 2. Cooperation on international standards, development and funding in cyberspace to improve and prove the security of networks, protocols, hardware and software. 3. Deescalation of cyber capabilities and activities. These exercises can be expressed in many ways such as 'cyber-free days' where nations show their good intentions by withholding operations in good faith. 4. International investment, development, data sharing and standardization of forensics capabilities to squeeze the attribution problem. This may be done in lockstep with protocol development. But at its root there are three reasons nations hack one another: intelligence, intellectual property, sabotage. Whatever deterrents and legal frameworks are in place will need to be as or more compelling than the motivations for cyberactivity. Whatever can be done to limit what can be gained by intelligence, sabotage and IP theft will in turn limit cyber activity. So a fifth item would be to reexamine and double down on the international peace keeping frameworks that discourage the listed above.

happyscrappy 12y ago
>But at its root there are three reasons nations hack one another: intelligence, intellectual property, sabotage. Or in this case to block their own citizens access to information that is available worldwide.
- xnull6guest 12y ago
  Meh - that's not why there are cyber attacks. I mean - if you take the attacks on greatfire and SONY they are retaliations for propaganda operations. 'Information' available around the globe and 'narrative' around the globe are not easily disentangled. The US also faces these challenges, and uses a series of tactics (mostly Sunstein style shilling) of dealing with these issues (but also limited forms of censorship partnerships). Namely these cyber activities are not censorship in the most obvious and indisputable form, as you suggest. My argument above can be thought of a way to deal with the international problem of cybermilitary attacks. Diplomacy products are another, separate, issue.