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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

I'd be really interested in seeing the declassified intelligence the article mentions that points the finger at Chinese-intelligence. While proving that the attackers originate in China might be easy, clearly connecting this to a government-supported operation seems quite a challenge involving long chains of reasoning. It's probably not feasible to release all the info needed to independently verify this, but we'll see.

I can also imagine how this line could be blurry... perhaps the government quietly permits more profit motivated blackhat operations in exchange for some intelligence sharing. And really the perfect "cyber attack" shouldn't be attributable at all.

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> perhaps the government quietly permits more profit motivated blackhat operations in exchange for some intelligence sharing

I've long wondered if we're going to see cyber warfare "letters of marque" at some point.

In retaliation to cyber attacks on US companies, the US government could designate Chinese firms with connections to the Chinese government (and particularly those which support the Chinese military) in letters of marque, allowing retaliatory IP theft, permission to cause damages, etc.

If the Chinese government is behind these attacks on US companies, than we are in a de facto state of warfare.

If we see cyber warfare "letters of marque" imagine if they allow for the takedown of internet pirates without allegiance to any particular country.

I doubt we'll see formal legal letters of marque until and unless we're in a state of open war. The US government already has a policy of using kinetic means to retaliate against serious cyber attacks and other governments take similar approaches. So unleashing a bunch of mercenaries without clear constraints would create a dangerous risk of unexpected escalation.

But federal law enforcement could simply decline to pursue private actors who attacked adversary states. Plausible deniability, to an extent.

The open warfare can't come soon enough, as far as caring about the stability of our infrastructure is concerned.

Did you have limited skirmishes in mind or a nuclear war?

Escalating attacks on State/corp network infrastructure would lead to better tools being built immediately by those who have the resources to do so, hopefully making their way to everyone eventually.

What are you thinking! Open cyber warfare could destroy our way of life. Imagine if all electronic records were very suspect. Bank acct values had millions of known wrong values.

I watched someone take ten pictures of pure black last night to keep a "streak" fire emoji next to their chats on Snapchat.

Our way of life is kind of fucked, to be blunt, and our consumer tech culture could use a cull.

Those who don't understand or respect tech...they haven't been (explained/bitten by) the consequences of their ignorance.

But total war might follow.

Live by the sword...What if NSA already did the same to China? That's their mission, isn't it? China's "NSA" succeeded but became public.

Our NSA might have succeed dozens of time but China keeps it a secret.

You're right, but there also may be highly sensitive intelligence at play here. If US intelligence has a mole in Chinese intelligence, and/or access to Chinese government systems, they could have smoking gun proof. They may have been able to trace it to them with high confidence even without that proof, but we'll probably never know for sure, since they'll never publicize the real details.

Chinese government is a complex hierarchy. Documented, planed, coordinated attacks are really rare. Most of the breaches are carried out by Chinese civil hackers or contractors, The harvested data was later funneled to government agencies by various markets and cooperative projects.

I've seen one these "lone wolf" actor preemptively collecting emails of a very high profile target via sophisticated penatration (APT? LOL), then sold these data to a state-owned enterprise. In exchange his hacking violations were cleared.

The government simply kept a loose end to these kind of foreign hacks. For domestic offense, the rules are very strict. Some dude famously posted some kind of minor XSS vulnerability of a random PLA veteran management site, then the hole public disclosure site was shutdown by the government and site admin was jailed. LMAO. So today the Chinese underground market was more active than ever before, because there are no more free bugs.

You are misinformed.

What's your sourcing on all of this?

Everything you just said--if legitimate and if identified via IC-contracted *INT--would with near-certainty be classified and appropriately compartmentalized. If it's research from an outside institution, it'd be more interesting to read it.

I think it's a mix of both, much like it is in Russia.

Are you just trying to sow doubt for China's sake or do you legitimately have issue with what was said by the two sources and Just Dept case.

> While proving that the attackers originate in China might be easy, clearly connecting this to a government-supported operation seems quite a challenge involving long chains of reasoning.

Connecting to a government-supported operation has already be done before [0]. There probably isn’t that much difficulty to do it again.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398

The article mentions that the US Government has not attributed the hack to China. This step has been done by private security contractor firms who "notice a lot of similarities" with other hacks attributed to China.

This is extremely weak reasoning. Any state actor would have the ability to cover its tracks, and more importantly to frame other state actors.

The article ends with a bit of classic anti-communism fear mongering.

It wouldn't be the first time a private security firm exposed Chinese hacking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398

Mandiant's report: https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf...

Replace Chinese with Russian and ask yourself if you still want to see the declassified Intel.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with this comment.

Why wouldn't we want to see the declassified intel on Russian hacking? What does that even mean?

My guess is that it's a reference to Hillary Clinton losing election due to hacked emails.

Yes, I would like to see all declassified intel indicative of any foreign power performing a cyber attack on us. Is that somehow controversial?

You should always ask for evidence for claims. A quick reminder that the US intelligence community lied to the Bush administration about WMDs in Iraq, as well as about the existence of PRISM and related programs. Trusting the intelligence community, in the absence of evidence, is hardly a reasonable standpoint.

Why would it matter if the claim were Russia, China, or North Korea?

You've violated the prime directive. /hackernews/2017/08/22/0/

I went to that date but couldn't see anything.

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