

The Chinese Way of Hacking - uladzislau
http://www.fastcompany.com/1766812/inside-the-chinese-way-of-hacking

======
Uhhrrr
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.

~~~
wisty
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.

~~~
yicai
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.

------
alf
>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.

~~~
trotsky
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...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/federal-ministers-emails-
suspected-of-being-hacked/story-e6frfrnr-1226029713668)

~~~
Estragon
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.

~~~
trotsky
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.

~~~
Estragon
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.)

~~~
trotsky
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?

------
Volpe
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

------
freedrull
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>

