
When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us - wolfgke
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612638/when-chinese-hackers-declared-war-on-the-rest-of-us/
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bigmonads
The article misses the context of our generation, in which multiple Western
and Eastern governments as an underlying trend have been exercising the same
behaviors.

Australia officially banned strong encryption for state surveillance this
week. The Unite States got caught in the world's most intrusive global and
domestic surveillance effort and buried the news of this through its
relationship with the domestic press. Poland repealed its supreme court after
upending its government. Israel has been criticized for its domestic
assassination program targeting thousands of people a year. The United States
has a threat scoring system automatically scoring political, social, economic,
and other "risk" data into municipal police departments so that these people
can be monitored and managed without a warrant.

The fact of the matter is Western nations have been engaging on censorship,
surveillance and "perception management" and "strategic communication" (read:
propaganda) campaigns at home and around the world for decades.

Chinese hackers aren't "Us versus Them". The British _helped_ the Chinese
establish a modern propaganda program over the past decade. Where are the
British in this article?

Overall, disappointed at the narrow view of the article. It can't offer
solutions because its hasn't identified the problems.

~~~
richardw
Every country uses their advantages, but I think you've painted a false
equivalence here. Your comment won't get you a reduced Social Credit System
score. Nobody's going to come knocking on your door. You can post critiques of
Britain, US, EU etc but you'll still be unjailed and alive in the morning.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)

~~~
jacobtwotwo
I think the point is that China is exploiting the same system that other
countries created and started exploiting prior, but it is doing so on a larger
scale and to a more obvious degree than the others. That is to say, yes, it's
a problem, but let's take a look at all the other instances of this type of
behavior, so we can work toward a general solution, rather than just saying
'fuck china!'.

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lightbyte
>Back in 2015, though, GitHub was still an up-and-coming, independent company
whose success came from making it considerably easier for other people to
create computer software.

GitHub was an "up-and-coming" company just three years ago in 2015? They were
founded in 2008 and immediately exploded in popularity. I can't take the rest
of the article seriously after reading just three paragraphs.

~~~
bluntfang
I would consider the audience not being engineers who use tools/services like
github everyday. At the end of the day, github wasn't some huge public company
with high market cap, and were recently bought by microsoft.

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candiodari
DDOSses (some of them) from China are indeed incredible. You trace them back,
and they turn out to come from the central datacenters of China Telecom
itself. Right out of the middle of their network core.

At first you think "IP spoofing". Every self-respecting DDOSer does it these
days. And that's true. Then you start tracing the path of the traffic. Turns
out the packets come straight from direct peering interface with China
Telecom, in Hong Kong. The IPs WEREN'T spoofed (so luckily they suck at it, or
at least some departments do).

Absolutely incredible. In my opinion this government maintains datacenters, at
least 40-50 racks, JUST for ddosing sites they dislike on the internet.

Just imagine what the legal and PR disaster any western telco would face if
they had maintained a datacenter dedicated to sabotaging others on the
internet. Incredible.

It also makes it hard to decide what to do. Cut off China Telecom ? You get a
choice: cut off all government (and academia) in China, or cut off everyone
else (except "special economic zones"). That's pretty much it for mainland
traffic.

Incredible.

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fouc
"Us" vs "Them" is a cognitive bias. A title that attempts to exacerbate that
bias isn't very nice.

~~~
Supermancho
Take any given server. Log the IPs of invalid SSH attempts to access the
machine over 3 months. Plot the IPs on a geolocation.

Chinese originating IPs are the overwhelming number.

I posted my actual data years ago as a response to some comment, but I could
just grab my recent logs and nothing has changed much (frequency, outliers,
and some volume trading).

While the phrasing may be obtuse, it's a sentiment reflecting reality.

~~~
auiya
It would stand to reason. China has the largest number of endpoints, and thus
is most likely to have the largest number of compromised hosts. I take it
you've ruled out the possibility this is a geographically diverse spread of
actors taking advantage of poor security practices on the large swaths of
Chinese infrastructure in your logs?

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squozzer
>GitHub and Tibetans like Lobsang Sither were among the first victims on a new
front in China’s war on the internet, launched by a new breed of censor
determined to go after the country’s enemies wherever they might be, using
whatever means necessary.

I wonder if China's fentanyl factories aren't plugged into the internet...

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tomohawk
Yet more evidence that shows the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in
suppressing people's rights in order to enhance their own power.

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walrus01
A DDoS is not "hacking". I've personally seen DDoS much bigger than the one
described in the article over things as trivial as League of Legends online
gaming.

