Dey Wuz 0wn3d
I gotta admit that I chuckled when I came across this, it brought back memories of movies like War Games and Hackers – the first an “OK” movie, the second, a classic.
The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American Âofficials.
The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.
Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.
One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence…trending towards total certainty†that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.
The article goes on to say that
The PLA regularly probes US military networks – and the Pentagon is widely assumed to scan Chinese networks – but US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times.
Of course they do, regardless of what western governments would like us to believe they are every bit as involved in covert espionage activities of this nature as the bad guys TM, and they most certainly have some of the best and the brightest in the world sitting at their keyboards probing for a way in.
If the Chinese did successfully hack the Pentagon, and if you pay close attention to the article the US is at this point only “trending towards” certainty of that, they blew it. Getting in, planting some surveillance kits, and getting out undetected would probably have been the ultimate goal.
Three questions….
[1] Can we believe them? This is a Pentagon that has lied in the past, who is to say they are not doing it now?
[2] Given recent the American intelligence community track record on “certainties” can we trust the accuracy of these anonymous statements?
[3] If someone did get in do ya suppose they got anything useful?
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“1] Can we believe them? This is a Pentagon that has lied in the past, who is to say they are not doing it now?”
They may be. But I’m not sure why anyone would doubt that the Chinese are trying to hack the Pentagon. Spies spy. That’s what they do.
Do you doubt that the Pentagon is hacking the Chinese, AND the Israelis, and the Russians, and us? And vice versa? Would any of that surprise any of us?
“[2] Given recent the American intelligence community track record on “certainties†can we trust the accuracy of these anonymous statements?”
See (1).
“[3] If someone did get in do ya suppose they got anything useful?”
Not being very knowledgeable about the world of intelligence gathering, who knows? I’m inclined to think the US is probably better at this sort of thing than the Chinese, but who can say?
Maybe it’s already been done, but if I were working at the Pentagon (or any other countries National Defense Agency), I would expect this kind of thing, and get a little tricky.
If I thought my network would be hacked, I would devise a virus and store it in a file on my server entitled “Super-Extra-Mega-Top-Secret”. What foreign power would not try to access that file? A good way to teach someone a lesson.
OR put the really good stuff in a folder called “What We Sent To Karl Rove”. Who’d bother looking?
You guys are no fun at all
The answer to question #1 is, no, we cannot believe them; and the answer to question #2 is that because of their answers we cannot trust them – and none of that is American bashing, it’s simple networking.
How do they know that it was the Chinese, and specifically the PLA? How can they?
If you’re a PLA hacker are you gonna launch your attack from a PLA barracks?
If you’re a Chinese super hacker spy, either living at home, or on assignment in south America are you gonna launch your attack from the spy office? The Chinese embassy?
No, you’re not, and most certainly not if you’ve got the smarts to actually have a realistic chance of getting anywhere close to something good. The first rule of hacking is “thou shalt not hack from where you can get traced back to” – and anyone smart enough to get into that sort of system knows that.
If I was gonna attempt this, and let it be known right up front that I have enough smarts to know that I don’t have anywhere near the smarts to needed to even come close to accomplishing such a thing, I certainly wouldn’t do it from my living room where my IP address could be traced directly back to my bank account.
That would be dumber that that bag of hammers we used to hear about so much wouldn’t it?
Maybe I’d compromise a machine on some other network, some corporate wireless network with lax wireless security so that the point of attack wouldn’t be from my living room.
Maybe I’d go on vacation to some other country and compromise some unsuspecting network there so that the attack didn’t come from my hotel room.
Maybe I’d go to Bulgaria and tap into one of the endless lists of unsecured networks in Turkey.
Is the theory behind this starting to become somewhat clearer? The Pentagon can tell the network where the attack came from, but it cannot tell who launched the attack, or from where.
So while they may well have detected an attack launched from a Chinese network that does not mean that the hacker was either Chinese, or even sitting at a keyboard in China.
The sort of news they’re letting go sounds really good on the face of it all, especially if you connect American statements on the Chinese military buildup in light of the recent trouble with Chinese products entering the US, but if it’s given any thought at all it starts to become suspect rather quickly.
You ask how we know that it was China. Well, the Pentagon said it was, I assume they have proof. (I always hate assuming, heh)
Of course they said they knew who it was, I asked how they could know — they also said that al Qaeda had significant ties to the Hussein regime, that Iraq had a nuclear program, that there were weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi war would be a short one (“Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” sound familiar?), and a host of other things – they should be believed now because…………..?