EU extends sanctions against Chinese, Russian, N.Korean hackers for another year | Hacker News Reader

EU extends sanctions against Chinese, Russian, N.Korean hackers for another year

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So this applies to only 8 individuals and 4 entities that have been caught in the act. I wonder what's the number of attacks that are successful and never detected, or never publicly acknowledged.

There need to be more widespread measures taken against the source networks implicated in the attacks. Anyone who's ever monitored the logs of any public facing web service knows that it's immediately and constantly probed for popular vulnerabilities (Drupal, Wordpress, etc.) coming from mostly Chinese IPs. These are low effort bots no doubt and not coordinated attacks, but something should be done at the ISP or country level to block this traffic. It's unreasonable that every single service needs to implement its own mitigation techniques (fail2ban, etc.).

What is sort of evidence is there against these groups?

Would it actually hold up in court? Or is it laid out there by authorities knowing well that these cases will never get to court because it deals with people in Russia, China, North Korea.

If so. Then what prevents this from being just pure geopolitics?

A court is a deliberately high bar to set. It's unlikely that you could get "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of evidence for people living in foreign countries.

That's part of the balance that we've struck for the judicial system. They have a lot of power to punish, so they set a high bar of evidence. To cross that bar, they give prosecutors a fair bit of power, but supervised by judges.

So it's possible that if one could subpoena witnesses and obtain warrants, they could perhaps raise it to a level that would stand up in law. But you certainly can't get that for a hostile country, and international law enforcement is always going to have to deal with a much lower standard of evidence. And also a lower punishment, because they can't get access to them.

That's going to be indistinguishable from geopolitics, especially since they're not going to show you the evidence that they can gather against the target country's own laws. At an international level it's an anarchic Wild West, with far less certainty than you would tolerate within your own country with its checks and balances.

> Then what prevents this from being just pure geopolitics?

What is countries waging cyber operations against each other, if not politics?

Curious how those hackers are affected by EU's sanctions. Do they even care or are they too busy rolling on the floor from the laughter?

Sanctions currently apply to eight individuals and four entities, and include an asset freeze and a travel ban.

Not sure about specifics.

Do they have any assets in the EU?

AFAIK those hackers are tolerated by their governments as long as they play ball and provide their services for black ops when needed and mostly live in gated upper class communities by the sea side and don't care to come to the EU any time soon.

They also can't do business with EU entities, so they're very likely locked out of the EU banking sector. They were already sanctioned in the US, so that leaves them very few banks that will process their payments.

But if they have the support of their home state, even these restrictions won't impact them much. They'll be issued false identities for use abroad, and almost any state would be able to issue an identity which could fool KYC requirements at a bank.

They could not care less. Their own government will never let them have anything in EU.

they can't travel anywhere outside their countries I guess. even if the could, legally, I bet they won't risk it. speculating: maybe they also get issues with local banking, e.g. converting money or opening credit cards. banks are all connected and they might enforce the sanctions to be on the safe side.

I don’t know how efficiently these sanctions work but in example

> Today's sanctions consist of a travel ban and an asset freeze imposed on the individuals, and an asset freeze imposed on the body. In addition, EU persons and entities are forbidden from making funds available to those listed.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2020...

…so not completely useless, maybe not very effective but it’s important also the message to the nations who support them.

If their home state was supportive, they would take those frozen assets as collateral for loans of equal value. Then effectively the frozen assets have no effect.

One day, probably after the death of the sanctioned individual, those assets will be unfrozen and used to repay the state.

Not that much. Sanctions are used as a political tool and to signal that certain lines have been crossed.

If anything the EU's symbolic sanctions signal the respective states can continue doing what they're doing with practical impunity. Same as when they sanctioned a handful officials for the Xinjiang concentration camps and the people directly responsible aren't even on the list.

International relations benefit from a range of sanctions, including very minor ones, because it allows you to ramp up and down pressure to suit the relative degree to which you care about any of the thousands of disagreements between nations, rather than just having a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer for every occasion.

The argument is the sanctions are extremely lax and symbolical. They did nothing to improve the situation and appear to do more to appease the own population than put the CCP under pressure.

"We're getting tough on Xi's regime", but in reality we aren't. Whatever happened to Never Again?

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

That these sanctions — which are for hacking rather than for genocide — are lax and symbolic is basically what I’m saying they need to be in order have room for things like “make sure China doesn’t invade Taiwan”.

This is why there are also significantly greater sanctions against Russia for The Crimea and The Ukraine, and the sanctions against North Korea for the nukes.

I agree that “Never again” was indeed never more than a slogan.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history_(after_Wo...

The disagreement isn't about how sanctions work, you're right about that. Taiwan is acutely threatened and their airspace and waters are routinely violated by the PLA. They're attempting to infiltrate the country on all fronts - through the media, through their democratic system and by recruiting Taiwanese to infiltrate the country from within, same as they did in HK before the takeover. There should be heavy sanctions for what is happening already, and not just with HK and Taiwan. If the CCP were to invade this would be an action far beyond sanctions, we can't just throw all these people under the bus! Taiwan is an independent and free country with over 23 million people. It would be like watching them invade the Netherlands without sending military help.

Mainland China is well connected and increasingly powerful, it's not like North Korea or a Soviet Union when they were close to economic collapse. In many ways the Chinese system is actually more resilient than the US or the EU. Taiwan needs to be defended, the CCP has to be stopped right there. If sanctions were all that was standing between them and Taiwan, the Republic of China would be history already.

Germany extends sanctions against NSA-Agents too..oh..never-mind, that never happened.

And neither did the reverse, in a much less publicized affair on the side of the Atlantic where Claas Relotious spent a decade captivating the masses.

Documents that SPIEGEL has been able to review show that the BND, until a few years ago, actually had considerable interest in the United States as a target of espionage. The document states that just under 4,000 search terms, or selectors, were directed against American targets between 1998 and 2006.

The German intelligence agency used the selectors to surveil telephone and fax numbers as well as email accounts belonging to American companies like Lockheed Martin, the space agency NASA, the organization Human Rights Watch, universities in several U.S. states and military facilities like the U.S. Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the secret service agency belonging to the American armed forces. Connection data from far over 100 foreign embassies in Washington, from institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Washington office of the Arab League were also accessed by the BND's spies.

The entries also prove the existence of a top-secret anti-terror alliance between Western intelligence services, including those of Germany, the United States and France. SPIEGEL already reported back in 2005 on the elite unit, which is named Camolin. The papers now show several BND selectors were "Camolin-related."

Also on the selector list were lines at the U.S. Treasury Department, the State Department and the White House.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellig...

Either way, Germany isn’t the EU.

Pretty interesting thanks!

>Either way, Germany isn’t the EU.

Sure it is, we don't have to argue about that.

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