Ryan Pyle Blog: Cyber Attacks

Hello.

According to a New York Times article today, the cyber attacks that Google reported in January came from two computer science schools in China. A computer scientist professor from one of the schools believes that it could be just a patriotic "nerd", or a bored student, interested in testing his/her hacking skills by trying to crack western websites. But the attacks or hacks that focus on the email accounts of human rights activists leads one to believe there is something much darker going on. The original story is below.

Just a note on this. The Chinese government has an ever-growing dangerous habit of allowing criminal behavior happen as long as it is projected at "foreigners" or non-Chinese entities. These cyber attacks seem to fit that bill. Other behavior that falls in line with this trend were the incredible anti-Japanese protests that shook cities throughout China in May 2005. At that time many university students took to the streets, smashing Chinese owned stores selling Japanese products and attacking the Japanese consulate in Shanghai and embassy in Beijing. Behavior that was condoned and allowed to occur for, in many people's views, for far too long. But what happens on the day that Chinese government ministries are hacked? What happens when bank account details of government officials are leaked to the media, along with the business interests of themselves and their family members? What happens when thousands of student take to the streets and instead of screaming anti-Japanese slogans they are looking for a second party to cheer for?

Just because the behavior is directed at others today, doesn't mean it won't ever be directed at The Party. Tides can change pretty quick in our modern age. Dangerous behavior is dangerous behavior, no matter who it is focused at.

Original Story LINK:
Copywrite: New York Times
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February 19, 2010
Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks

By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA

SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.

They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.

If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.

The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.

Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.

Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.

Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.

Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated.

“We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.

Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said they had not heard that American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses.

If it is true, “We’ll alert related departments and start our own investigation,” said Liu Yuxiang, head of the propaganda department of the party committee at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

But when asked about the possibility, a leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.” The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,” the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”

At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.

A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name, said, “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. Also, because our school adopts close management, outsiders cannot easily come into our school.”

Mr. Shao acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.

Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.

A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.

Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.

Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique — called man-in-the-mailbox — to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.

After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.

John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan in Shanghai contributed research.
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Ryan Pyle
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Website: www.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Google Gives Us Hope

Hello.

Ai Wei Wei is a man who isn't afraid to speak his mind. He was once praised by the Chinese central government, for helping design the famed Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, and not long afterwards was being beat up in a hotel room in Chengdu by a bunch of thugs as he wanted to learn more about the collapsed schools during the Sichuan Earthquake.

For who ever thinks that Ai Wei Wei might be a careless activist, think again. He is very careful with his words and his articles/options are always very well written and very well thought out. Which is why I feel anytime he is published in the English language media it's important to read his words and debate his point of view; as is common in any open society where the freedom of speech and of ideas are protected.

Pay special attention to his last paragraph. It's a stunner.

Original Story LINK
Copywrite Wall Street Journal
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Google Gives Us Hope
If China can remain powerful though it limits freedom of speech, what kind of monster will it become?
By AI WEIWEI

China may have become the second-biggest economy in the world, but its political system remains stuck in the early 20th century. Even as Chinese people's horizons are broadening, the government clings to a one-party ideology that is hostile to personal freedom. Technology is making possible greater expression and political participation, but that has only prompted the authorities to work harder to stifle these impulses.

All this makes Google's decision to stop censoring to protect its China operations especially significant. First, it is encouraging for the Chinese people to see that a leading Internet company recognizes that censorship is a violation of basic human rights and values. Such controls damage the core ethos underpinning the Internet.

To stand up and speak out in a society in which those values are under constant attack requires courage and deserves moral support. Politicians and enterprises should not trade those basic rights for profits, because any short-term deal will only lead to long-term losses.

In several cases the judicial system has used information from an accused person's email as evidence of attempting to overthrow the government. This is a clear case showing how an authoritarian state can use technology not to benefit social life and improve political participation, but rather to violate the privacy of individuals and control their thinking, communication and expression.

From last October, I found that two of my Gmail accounts were being hacked by unknown intruders, and my Gmail messages were being automatically transferred to an unknown address. Other activists have reported the same intrusions to their Gmail accounts.

Most discouraging to those of us who are fighting for increased freedom is the tendency for developed nations to lower the bar to please China. They make excuses not to concern themselves with violations of human rights. To espouse universal values and then blind oneself to China's active hostility to those values is irresponsible and naïve.

When American officials come to China with a pretty smile and the soft tone of a so-called "friendly gesture," this only tells us how fragile and vulnerable these moral standards can be. It makes the people still in the struggle feel disappointed.

In recent months China has tightened its censorship over every medium, from the Internet to the mainstream media to instant messaging over mobile phones. This is the mark of a government that has lost confidence in its own ideology and is nervous about its power to control its own people. Stopping the free exchange of information ultimately hampers economic growth and opportunity, which is the Chinese government's main claim to legitimacy. The question then is how a state based on limiting information flows and freedom of speech can remain powerful. And if it can, what kind of monster it will become.

Mr. Ai is a Beijing-based artist and activist.
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Ryan Pyle
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The China Fix

Hello,

Every now and then you read something that completely captures the moment. It's not just a case of great journalism but also a case of vast experience, knowledge and the canny ability to step back from a situation and see it clearly and objectively. Below is just such a piece of writing.

The timing is important because Google have called out China and support from other tech companies is thin. Few are willing to stand up against what many consider a harder stance and more threatening business environment in China. James writes with an openness, an honesty and with two decades of China business experience. Please read below:

Online LINK: The China Fix

Copywrite: James McGregor
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Monday, Feb. 01, 2010
The China Fix
By James McGregor

In my more than two decades in China, I have seldom seen the foreign business community more angry and disillusioned than it is today. Such sentiment goes beyond the Internet censorship and cyberspying that led to Google's Jan. 12 threat to bail out of China, or the clash of values (freedom vs. control) implied by the Google case. It is about the perception that antiforeign attitudes and policies in China have been growing and hardening since the global economic crisis pushed the U.S. and Europe into a tailspin and launched China to its very uncomfortable stardom on the world stage. (Read "Google Ends Policy of Self-Censorship in China.")

Visiting CEOs' banquet-table chatter is now dominated by swapping tales of arrogant and insolent Chinese bureaucrats and business partners. The litany includes purposefully inconsistent and nontransparent enforcement of regulations, rampant intellectual-property theft, state penetration of multinationals through union and Communist Party organizations, blatant market impediments through rigged product standards and testing, politicized courts and agencies that almost always favor local companies, creative and selective enforcement of WTO requirements ... The list goes on. (See "Google Earth Adds Historical Photos.")

The foreign business community in China has deep respect and affection for the Chinese people and their hard-earned success. But more than a few foreign business leaders are asking themselves if they have been bamboozled by the system. Multinationals have been solid citizens in China, handing over heaps of capital, technology, training, source code, best practices and proprietary products to joint-venture partners they were forced into bed with. They have funded schools, orphanages, disaster reconstruction, overseas scholarships and all manner of poverty-alleviation programs. But now that the China market matters more to them, it appears that China couldn't care less. Increasingly difficult China-market access is the immediate worry. But many are looking ahead and losing sleep over expectations that their onetime partners are morphing into predators — and that their own technology and know-how will be coming back at them globally in the form of cut-price products from subsidized state-owned behemoths.

At the same time, I have also seldom seen the Chinese government and business community more unsettled and uncertain. Theirs is an arrogance borne of insecurity. The global financial chaos and China's rocketing global status threw off the meticulous national development schedules carefully crafted by the risk-averse and surprise-allergic engineers who run the Party. (See the top 10 Google Earth finds.)

The pressures on Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are overwhelming. They are white-knuckling their way through their final two years in office, focusing on 8% or higher growth and crushing any dissent that could derail it. The Chinese people are generally pretty happy, but the Party leadership is terrified of their outsized expectations. People under age 40, the progeny of the one-child policy, didn't live through Maoist poverty and upheaval. They are pampered, impatient and demanding. They consider exponential growth as a basic benchmark of life, and access to information to be a civil right. China's rich are powerful opponents of further reform and opening. They made money the local way and are determined to block foreign competition so this can continue.

In their spare time, China's leaders are reaching under the carpet to tackle the country's endemic corruption, epidemic pollution, emaciated health care, shredded social services, entrenched industrial overcapacity and swiftly aging population, to name a few. They have little remaining bandwidth, and no experience or desire to be the visionary and magnanimous world leaders who can look beyond China's own often desperate needs that the world wants them to be.

So both Chinese and non-Chinese have legitimate challenges and understandable phobias. Google is just a proxy in this intensifying dispute. It's really about rebalancing the economic and political dynamic between China and the developed world, with the U.S. as the key negotiator for the West. It won't be easy. China and the U.S. are past masters at blaming their domestic policy failings on outsiders. Finger-pointing politicians and chest-beating nationalists in the two nations will make rational discussion nearly impossible. Yet it is time for leaders on both sides of the Pacific to lift their heads above overwhelming domestic concerns and fix China's deteriorating relationship with foreign business and the developed world before things get out of control. One thing's certain: they won't find the answers through Google.

**McGregor, a senior counselor for APCO Worldwide, is a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and author of One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China
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Ryan Pyle
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ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
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