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China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
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lgarey@techweb.com
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[email protected],
 User Rank: Apprentice
2/21/2013 | 5:29:17 PM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
The report essentially implying "how "elite" can this Unit 61398 military hacking unit be if it doesn't know not to let Mandiant trace all the "IP addresses used in attacks to a specific, 12-story, beige building in the Pudong district of Shanghai" raises more questions than it answers. Seems like Mandiant should have spent more time on firm attribution. Lorna Garey, IW Reports
MarkSitkowski
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MarkSitkowski,
 User Rank: Moderator
2/22/2013 | 12:06:37 AM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
We've been fighting a botnet since December 2012. We get hack attempts, using a limited number of identical scripts, from servers in (so far) 25 countries, including China. It should be fairly obvious that, as mentioned in the last paragraph, the attacks are not coming from those individual countries, but from the creep controlling the botnet. Get real, Mandiant. (Or, maybe, you'd like to help us out, here - we've destroyed 1350 zombies so far, but they keep on coming...)
garye
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garye,
 User Rank: Apprentice
2/22/2013 | 7:21:24 PM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
Shouldn't be that hard send a program back with the information that will take out everyone involved. Send it with the information they are accessing. When they open the file there goes every computer connected. Seems simple enough and if it's not them it will take out the one who is doing it.
MarkSitkowski
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MarkSitkowski,
 User Rank: Moderator
2/23/2013 | 8:24:04 AM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
Don't think that it hadn't crossed my mind, but you can't do that. Among the zombies was a server at an airport, another at a hospital, and several in education networks. It might have been very dangerous.
We just report the IP address to the ISP, who then disinfects the server. For what it's worth, we've had good cooperation from ISP's in China, Romania, Russia, Brazil and everywhere except Turkey.
Andrew Hornback
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Andrew Hornback,
 User Rank: Apprentice
2/24/2013 | 2:45:22 AM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
One of the things that comes into play here with the deployment of "poison pills" is that if it gets revealed that you really are going after a military or governmental organization, that could have diplomatic ramifications. Although, you'd have to think that someone at one of those Federal agencies that doesn't exist would have come up with the idea of watching all traffic leaving the country through a PoP destined for China by now.

A site that I'm familiar with has been noticing that they were getting scraped by 61398 every morning in the wee earlies (EST), by bots sending random HTTP requests. While it's possible to drop all of the traffic to that IP block, they decided to throttle everything down to 1kbps of throughput so that everything could be documented in the event that there was ever a need to take further action.

I'm somewhat surprised that you get good response from China and Russia - back when I was in a position to report offenders to ISPs, the worst response that I got came from the African region, followed by China and Russia.

What's making this more "interesting" is the different tools that these organizations are using. Sure, it's great to take over someone's PC and use it as part of a Botnet, but what about taking over their mobile phone? Drive up their data costs while waging war and being a mobile target at the same time - talk about a serious misdirection play, and something that very few people would ever have the skills to catch on their own. Yet another reason why I'm against BYOD, but that's an entirely different story.

Andrew Hornback
InformationWeek Contributor
burn0050bb
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burn0050bb,
 User Rank: Apprentice
2/26/2013 | 4:09:57 PM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
Guess who else engages in massive cyber espionage? Perhaps the government that created the internet? While I have no doubt that the Chinese government is participating (as is the US government, and the UK, and...) - saying that you have pinpointed an attack is ludicrous. With the proliferation of botnets these days, there's just no way to know who's behind what attacks.
Lee Hu
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Lee Hu,
 User Rank: Apprentice
4/25/2013 | 12:05:04 PM
re: China Denies U.S. Hacking Accusations: 6 Facts
The Chinese government would steal your wallet right in front of you, then say, "we didn't do that." Of course they are not going to admit it, what else would they say? One after another, Internet security groups are finding the same thing: the Chinese government, through the PLA, is behind the shameless theft and rampant espionage.


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