

State actor seen behind "enormous" wave of cyber attacks - anderzole
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/03/us-cyberattacks-idUSTRE7720HU20110803

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IanDrake
Does anyone here know how one would differentiate between someone (or group of
hackers) in China doing this vs. the Chinese government being behind it? I'm
just curious how that's determined.

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yumraj
Does it matter? Let me explain:

Look at the targets, governments like US, India, Vietnam with which China has
a beef, and corporations accessing whose data can give leverage to Chinese
companies and government. So, in the end, if you consider all the data that
must have been collected, who is the most obvious customer of that data? Its
the Chinese government. So even if it is a group of hackers, they must do
something with that data. If it was a small time intrusion for bragging
rights, then it wouldn't have continued for so long.

So, the way I see it, whether it was a group of hackers (i.e. not directly
affiliated with the Chinese govt.) or Chinese government employees, the end
customer of the data is the same and hence this activity must have been
sanctioned by the government and hence even if they were not in the beginning,
I have no doubt that they are currently behind it (whether that implies
involvement or support is irrelevant).

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rdtsc
Let me present another scenario. This is what the intelligence community calls
a "false flag attack". Another (rather technologically advanced) state, that
for some reason would like China to be attacked publically as a state
sponsoring cyber-terrorism, could for example build a large botnet in China
and use it to conduct these attacks.

China is the current token 'rogue cyber terrorist' state. So this other
agent/state could take advantage of that perception to either gather real data
from the attacked entities or conduct all this activity just to damage China's
reputation.

~~~
ryanhuff
Not completely out of the question, but considering the risk to China's
reputation (as you stated), and their ability to control the internet in
China, you would think they would understand this false-flag risk, and take
action to prevent this.

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andrewvc
I thought it was going to turn out that Michael Ian Black was behind lulzec.

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dreww
More good commentary here on another HN post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840062>

and the blog post on McAfee has more details than any popular account:
[http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/revealed-operation-
shady...](http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/revealed-operation-shady-rat)

