The Chinese Way of Hacking | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese Way of Hacking

fastcompany.com

28 pointsuladzislau14 comments

tl;dr: Whether the attackers are criminals, government agents, or bored kids is unknown, and even whether the attacks really originate in China is in question. No description of "The Chinese Way of Hacking" is given, other than speculation that one exists.

At a guess - bored Chinese guy starts learning about hacking, so he can view stuff that's not allowed in China (i.e. porn). Bored Chinese guy gets interested in hacking. Next, he starts defacing sites, or gets involved in organized cyber-crime. He gets busted, and given a choice - prison time, or a job in intelligence.

There's no need to become a hacker for porn in China. Mostly people learn about hacking for flying over the great fire wall, for youtube/facebook/twitter etc.

The crackers forming is another story. Pirated Windows XP is everywhere, along with Internet Explorer 6 (what a surprise). That makes cracking easy, and so called safe guard softwares like 360 popular.

description of "The Chinese Way of Hacking"

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

(not an insult, it's very effective)

Yes, it was a very disappointing article.

Agreed - a disappointingly vague piece. There are certainly better English-language sources, The Dark Visitor, for example.

>They basically assume that the National Security Agency (NSA) is in all their networks.

This a really interesting point. With all the media coverage to all the alleged Chinese hacks, we tend to forget that the US Government is likely engaging in the same activities. Would it surprise anyone if the US has been engaging in digital espionage on foreign governments? I would be surprised (and somewhat outraged given our defense budget) if we weren't.

Of course we do. And so do the french, germans, russians, brits, koreans, australians - well, you get the point.

And it's far from just against traditional enemies. Did you catch the incident where the Americans informed the Australians that the Chinese were in their federal minister's computer systems? [1] Wait, how did US intelligence know what what was going on in .au computers better than they did?

[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/federal-ministers-emails-s...

It's entirely plausible that US intellignce services have totally owned the entire IT infrastructure of the Australian Government, but this incident does not imply that. Google didn't have to hack other companies to know they'd been hacked by the same perpetrators. They learned of it when they traced back the hack on their own system.

If you're looking for smoking guns in state intelligence matters you either need to not be a civilian or wait 40 years after the event. For everyone else there is reading between the lines.

Sure, read between the lines, but discounting perfectly benign, more plausible explanations like the one I outlined is silly. (Why would the US hackers tip their hands to the Australian Government, if they got the information from hacking Australian Government computers? That would spark an international incident for no real benefit.)

Pretty out there for a "more plausible explanation" that hackers would be launching attacks from desktop pcs of high level australian government officials.

I'm not even sure what you're arguing about - you actually think either a) the US doesn't conduct cyber espionage or b) the US doesn't spy on it's friends?

Great, so in summary:

We don't really know if the chinese govt are involved, but we suspect they are. And we don't really know if the U.S govt are involved, but we suspect they are.

... hmmm

Another article hopping on the cyberwar 2011 bandwagon. [1]

Even NPR ran a similar story that was just as sensationalist and vague.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2659501

Reply on news.ycombinator.com