Chinese military scaled back cyberthefts after indictments, U.S. officials say | Hacker News Reader

Chinese military scaled back cyberthefts after indictments, U.S. officials say

washingtonpost.com

40 pointsmolecule23 comments

Honestly I don't trust the government on national security anymore. They waged a war wasting $1.7T of our wealth, they lied and continue to lie about snooping. I am not sure if US government is not helpless before Chinese aggression. When the source of information is only government and no third party to verify all the claims we better assume the government is simply lying.

[meta] This is truly getting absurd. The recent, but incessant downvoting of anyone who is skeptical of authority or the mouthpieces of the status quo. What is happening to HN?

For the purposes of this article in particular, attribution ranges from extremely hard to impossible, but the downvoters are expecting the parent to swallow the government's statements at face value, without question? As if the USG possesses some sort of magical crystal ball for incident attribution?

I have no problem with an argument about why you shouldn't believe something. I do have a problem with "vacuous skepticism"—a comment saying purely "this is doubtful and I remain skeptical" is the photonegative of a "this" or "me too" comment: a way to say "I [upvoted/downvoted] but I also want to say words to the same effect to call attention to myself, without adding anything to the discussion." It's an applause light; a magnet for upvotes from the same people who voted in a given direction on the story itself.

    > anymore

It's you, not them, that's changed in this situation

Or did they? From the article ...

“For a period of time following the indictments, there was a very significant decrease” by the PLA, said a second U.S. official. “And today we are definitely not at the level that we were before the indictments.”

...

The Unit 61398 hackers stopped their activity for a while, but other parts of the military continued their operations, and the Shanghai group eventually resumed using other tools, said an intelligence analyst at FireEye, which now owns Mandiant."

Sounds like they are just covering their tracks better. The most likely consequence, at best, would have been a Chinese Colonel was fired/reassigned and replaced with a newly promoted technocrat who has been told not to be caught.

Business as usual ...

Precisely. I can easily imagine the same story with the countries' roles flipped.

Somewhat hypocritical for the USA to complain about hacking.

We know the resources/extent of NSA capabilities and so it is pretty certain their spying efforts dwarf anything China does. I mean we know they spied on the German chancellor and she is on our side!

It's not really the spying that bothers people. Nearly every country is constantly spying on every other country. What is different is that Chinese hacking goes beyond snooping for national security reasons in a few ways.

They actively engage in corporate espionage (in a massive way) to aid their homegrown companies and directly harm US companies. As far as we know, the NSA isn't stealing trade secrets from BMW and giving them to GM.

They directly attack civilians for hosting content they don't like, e.g., the recent DDoS attack on github.

> As far as we know, the NSA isn't stealing trade secrets from BMW and giving them to GM.

After a 2-second Google search: "Snowden says NSA engages in industrial espionage" (from here http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/26/us-security-snowde...)

Notice he said nothing about giving trade secrets to US companies. Of course spy agencies are spying on companies from other countries, but there is a big difference between spying and stealing trade secrets to give local companies a competitive advantage.

that is exactly what they are and should be doing, e.g., google NSA & Petrobras

There is no evidence that the NSA is giving information from Petrobas to US oil companies to give them a competitive advantage.

NSA gives info to the advocacy center where _US_ companies (think Lockheed Martin) can ask for assistance, e.g., get access to competitors bids for international contracts etc.

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/7/7743/1.html

Nothing you posted contains any evidence that the NSA gives trade secrets to US companies (directly or indirectly) to increase their competitiveness.

What you posted is just the advocacy center's stated purpose--to help facilitate bids by US companies for foreign contracts.

I know the US government gets directly involved when dealing with companies like Lockheed Martin exporting military equipment. And I'm sure the NSA would share military secrets with defense contractors, but that is directly in their scope of mission to protect national security.

Stealing trade secrets to pad the bottom line of US companies is not part of their mission, and so far you've posted nothing to prove they are violating their mission in this way.

>so it is pretty certain their spying efforts dwarf anything China does

How is that certain? Where is the Chinese Edward Snowden dumping the docs about their capabilities?

>I mean we know they spied on the German chancellor and she is on our side!

Are you implying China couldn't spy on Angela Merkel if they wanted to? Or that they haven't?

Personally I think that if they wanted to, they could. The physical world around us is mostly theirs. They manufacture everything. Even "made in US" stickers on products actually made in China are also made in China. They could sneak in spy stuff pretty much wherever they want - especially if it has something to do with electronics.

Sure it would be easy for them to sneak it in there, but is the US so incompetent that it can not detect it? Otherwise where is the proof of this statistically significant physical spyware?

Modern electronics are incredibly complex. For instance, did you know that your CPU most likely has its own web server on board? It would be easy for a dedicated party - one that also controls manufacturing - to introduce changes on PCB or even component level. Changes that you'd have no way of figuring out they're there.

I'm quite ignorant on this subject and find your statement surprising. Are you talking about modern intel cpu's?

Correction: it's on the chipset, not CPU itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

Still, it runs out-of-band, it can be accessed even if your computer is turned off, as long as it's plugged in to a power source.

I'm guessing this is something that cannot be disabled in the BIOS/UEFI?

* EDIT * Actually, it looks like you can.

Has Superfish / Lenovo already been forgotten?

Supposedly the PLA started scaling back cyber ops after the indictments of May 2014.

>“From what we see, the majority of the intrusions today are coming from sets that we believe are MSS or MSS contractors versus the PLA,"...“That’s a shift that’s been happening roughly in the last year and a half.”

Last year and a half eh, so the shift was coincidental with the indictments. I hope these U.S. officials aren't enamored with the potency of the indictments. It appears the PLA's scaling back is a political play to get more at the bargaining table.

Let's not start patting ourselves on the back too quickly.

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