Saturday, March 8, 2008

china hacked the Pentagon!


What message is the media sending with this headline? Should everyone panic and sell their stocks and save their cash outside of cyberspace? Will they cyber-attack the US with wargames?


Why are they singling out the Chinese hackers over the Russian, Indian, African, South American, and US hackers.

For example, it doesn't mean anything to hack into the Pentagon. One would just 'hack in' and look around public files that support the external, public website. I hope that real Department of Defense communications and system's controls are on isolated networks (see demilitarized
DMZ). You can't hack in, unless you are already entrusted to be on the special equipment. There are tens of millions of people who have special permissions - they are the ones who we hope don't betray us.
Here's a pentagon site that could be 'hacked'
http://www.pentagon.mil/

The e-mails varied in sophistication. "The vast majority are fairly primitive," said
the expert, "littered with 'Chinglish' misspellings" or other obvious errors.


The anti-Chinese media is understandable, but doesn't address the root causes and concerns for our fears. The Chinese are 1B people (20% of the world's population) and that is an easy segment to point to and say "look, there's a problem."

The US is very frustrated because:
1. Every year $200B of wealth is transferred from the US to China; they currently own $1T US.
- what will the Chinese do with all of that money? (maybe raise their defense spending by
20%)
2. The Chinese Yuan is artificially weakened by 'pegging' it to the US dollar. As the US dollar weakens, the Yuan keeps the same relation, when really it should be strengthening and making Chinese products more expensive.

- the natural response for US politicians is to place duties/tarrifs on Chinese imports to balance out the trading and prevent the 'flooding' of products. Illegal Chinese trade practices make the US very uncompetitive by violating anti-dumping and copyright international laws, but two strong pressures prevent the appropriate US action:
a. the American consumer is so hungry for the best price (considering the immediate gratification over the long-term economical impact) that consumers will be appalled to pay this US tax on Chinese goods which prevent American consumers from reaping rock-bottom prices.
b. the US fears the Chinese government will be more aggressive militarily if we don't keep their economy appeased and they will shut off our capitalist opportunities to expand in the country (called FDI -- foreign direct investment)

Interestingly, the Chinese are entirely isolated from world events, the government blocks the internet from its people and manipulates the information that Chinese people have access to. Friends in China can't access world news, thoughts, or education. Their military is
large but the technology is still 30+ years behind the advanced countries of the world.
1. China plans to send a man to the
moon this year.
2. China developed a new nuclear
submarine that only rivals US/EU/Russian technology of the 60's.

Back to the hacking. Network admins watch pranksters attack the networks all day long with trojans and brute force scripts to sniff passwords. These untrained students are just showing off. To see a larger number of daily attacks coming from China than previously simply suggests that the nation is gaining self-awareness of the network we all live in. Truly harmless. Its nothing more than pranks and irritations.

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