Chinese Hackers
Chinese Hackers
Let me start this article with a few excerpts from the Popular Science article Hackers: The China Syndrome.
- For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun.
- By the time the offensive [on American websites by (primarily) Chinese hackers] was over, Chinese hackers had felled 1,000 American sites.
- An excerpt from an article referenced in Hackers: The China Syndrome called The First World Hacker War: ”We’ve achieved our goal,” the leader of Honkers Union said in one Chinese newspaper. ”It’s time for it to end.”
- In the past two years, Chinese hackers have intercepted critical NASA files, breached the computer system in a sensitive Commerce Department bureau, and launched assaults on the Save Darfur Coalition, pro-Tibet groups and CNN. And those are just the attacks that have been publicly acknowledged.
- The problem, of course, is that it’s practically impossible for the FBI to catch or prosecute hackers operating abroad. “The international legal framework doesn’t exist,” says the CSIS’s Lewis. And extraditing a hacker to the U.S. simply doesn’t happen, given our current relationship with China. Learning to defend ourselves seems to be the only option.
- Chinese hackers, it turns out, take credit on their own sites for attacks, leaving a long trail of documentation.
- Monitoring a cross-section of sites over several days to estimate the number of people logged in at any given time, he [Scott Henderson] came up with 380,000 hackers.
- In a 2005 Hong Kong Sunday Morning Post article, a man identified as “the Godfather of hackers” explains, “Unlike our Western [hacker] counterparts, most of whom are individualists or anarchists, Chinese hackers tend to get more involved with politics because most of them are young, passionate, and patriotic.” Nationalism is hip, and hackers — who spearhead nationalist campaigns with just a laptop and an Internet connection — are figures to revere.
- …the Chinese government tends not to prosecute hackers unless they attack within China…that lack of supervision is tacit approval, and it constitutes a de facto partnership between civilian hackers and the Chinese government.
- The government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And sometimes it tasks them and controls them.” In the end, he says, “it’s easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.”
- “These rogue groups are missing oversight,” Henderson says. “When a situation is approaching critical mass” — if, for instance, these hackers decide to abandon simple vandalism and start gunning for Social Security numbers or classified information — “who’s the guy who pulls back and says, ‘No, we don’t go any further’?
- If we can’t handle the information Chinese hackers are leaving now, scarier still is what could happen when it disappears.
Interesting, isn’t it? I’m afraid that I messed up the order of these excerpts, but those excerpts are a general summation of this great article on Chinese hackers.
The massive attack that took place from May 4th and lasted a few weeks preformed by mainly Chinese hackers was not the first attack that Chinese hackers had performed on U.S websites, but it was by far the biggest. By the time this attack was finished hackers from India, Saudi Arabia and Argentina had joined in with Chinese hackers in a massive movement that could have crippled this nation. The government raised its Infocon level fearing an outright cyber assault. The attack that felled a reported 1,000+ U.S websites including whitehouse.gov and other government websites was sparked when a U.S plane and a Chinese plan collided. The American pilot landed safely, but the Chinese pilot was unfortunately killed.
Now before I go on I want you to understand something about Chinese hackers. In a report from the Hong Knog Sunday Post in 2005 a man described as “the Godfather of Hackers” explains, “Unlike our Western [Hacker] counterparts, most of whom are individualists or anarchists, Chinese hackers tend to get more involved with politics because most of them are young, passionate, and patriotic.” Nationalism is cool in China, and with a laptop and an internet connection you can become the equivalent of a rockstar. That’s what spurs on movements like this, something many call Hacktivism. They are activists that use their skills in hacking to be politically active. And for them, they don’t have to worry about being prosecuted; China is the perfect country for hackers.
This is why the unfortunate plane collision sparked outrage among the Chinese, especially the hacker community and they lashed out. This outlash was the parent of the massive attack I mention before. The attack consisted of mostly defacements of various websites, especially government websites, but the attackers could have easily aimed higher. The scary thing though was the words of the leader of the Chinese hacker group Honkers Union: “We’ve achieved our goal. It’s time for it to end.”
Why is this scary? This was the leader of a hacker group; his group decided that this was enough, so they stopped. What if they hadn’t stopped? What if they decided that this wasn’t enough, that they wanted to make us literally pay, they could have stolen sensitive data, especially the often undergaurded credit card numbers. Maybe the other Chinese hacker groups followed their example, or maybe those other groups ended on their own time, but the thing is, nobody can control any of these hackers, least of all the Chinese government. They’re doing anything about it, their policy up to this point, as I’m sure it will continue to be, had been “As long as you don’t hack a Chinese computer, you’re probably safe from prosecution.” That leaves almost the whole world open, especially America. Unlike in America, hackers in China freely take credit for their hacker work; they don’t have to fear punishment from their government. They are looked upon as the American equivalent of a rockstar, they’re teen idols in China. That’s just how it is.
Chinese hackers usually operate alone or within small groups, but as demonstrated in what the New York Times dubbed as “The First world Hacker war” they will band together to attack a common target, and there isn’t much, if anything at all, that we can do to stop this force. Take, for example, the Chinese hacker group Red Army. Their leader publicly takes credit for his and his groups actions, and faces no prosecution. His group of more than 3,000 hackers can give you an idea on the massiveness of some of these groups. 3,000 hackers, that’s massive. All in one group, and for the most part united in their actions.
In the First World Hacker War a reported 1,000 U.S websites were taken down by mostly Chinese hackers, but were joined by Indian, Saudi Arabian, and Argentinean hackers before the attack was over. This 1,000 website number on a whole this number was much larger though. To grasp this number you must realize that the unreported American hacker community’s backlash to these defacements of American websites that must have gone on went unreported or even unknown to the public, and it was surely a massive hack conducted by many. So you see, the overall number of websites hacked in result of this massive Chinese attack would have surely been more than the publicized number.
The not so genius of Genius and the genius of Pandora
The not so genius of Genius and the genius of Pandora. Interesting title huh? I want to talk about why I don’t like Apple’s Genius feature and why I really like Pandora.
So first, why I don’t like Apple’s Genius. Awhile ago I dismissed this feature as unnecessary and annoying. A stupid feature that would try and convince me to buy songs. I wasn’t totally wrong, but I wasn’t totally right either. Apple’s Genius feature is designed to convince me to buy songs, but based on my tastes in music, not at random. Depending on which of the songs in my library get played the most and which I rate the highest will effect what Genius recommends for me. This is great and all, but what if I really like the back Skillet, but I didn’t have any of their music? if I had artists similar to them then maybe I would still get recommendations of other related bands, but then again, maybe not. The point I’m trying to make is that Genius is dependent on what is in my library. I can’t say that I like the band Skillet if I don’t have any of their songs in my library.
That’s where Pandora comes in. With Pandora I can say that I like Skillet and any other band and not have any of their songs in their library. I don’t even have to have music to be able to get recommendations on songs I may like if I use Pandora. Why? because Pandora is an internet radio. I give it songs I like and it gives me suggestions on songs that I may like in return. I can give Pandora my top 10 favorite artists and Pandora will recommend similar songs from other artists and also play songs from those artists. I get the best of both worlds. I get to listen to my favorite music, and listen to similar music by other people.
I used to think that this kind of approach was ridiculous “Why would I want to listen to music by a bunch of people that I’ve never heard of before?” but now as I’m expanding my music tastes I think that this kind of approach is great. Go ahead, check it out. You don’t even need an account to try it out. Pick your top 10 favorite artists and put the in and listen while you read some of my other posts 
Media
I had a “Music” page, but it DEFINITELY needed an overhaul.
I was going to write about music and how to get it free, but now I’ve also decided to include videos in this discussion, making this post titled “Media”.
If any of you read my Music page before I deleted it you would have read me recommending Songza.com. Now Songza.com isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not good either. Songza only lets you listen to music, same as Rhapsody and most other popular music sites.
First I want to talk about places to listen to music.
In my opinion the best places to listen to music online are free.napster.com, Rhapsody.com, Purevolume.com and Songza.com.
Free.napster.com is a great place to listen to free music. Unfortunately you can’t create playlists, but they do have a huge selection of artists and music.
Rhapsody.com, even though it has a 25 song limit, is still great. Rhapsody lets you create, but not save, playlists. One way you can get around the 25 song limit is to uninstall the Rhapsody Player, which can be found in the Add or Remove programs menu. This only works sometimes though, so don’t count on it.
Purevolume.com is a cool website with a lot of the top artists and songs on it. At purevolume you can listen to some music depending on what the Artist has provided, and one in awhile you can find some great songs to download. Purevolume doesn’t have a great selection of music, but the fact that there are totally legal songs on there for download makes it pretty good.
Songza.com is a decent online player. If it works. My experience with Songza hasn’t been too great. At first it worked great. I could create and save playlists and play all the songs I wanted, but then one day it stopped playing the music. I still don’t know why it doesn’t work for me, but oh well. It’s a good service.
The other service I would like to talk about that I didn’t mention above is Downrol.com, formerly known as MusicTNT, formerly known as Danceage. Here you can find and listen to most songs, and download them too. The songs come from Pillage.com. You can go directly to Pillage.com to try and find downloads of your favorite songs, or you can just do it through Downrol’s interface.
Now recently on my quest to download all of the 5 seasons of Teen Titans to my iPod I found an awesome program called Internet Download Manager. Internet Download Manager, or IDM, is a great program that not only allows you to easily download web videos no matter where they’re from, it also allows you to download music from a player such as Rhapsody. Here’s how it works out:
For music. In this example I will use Rhapsody.
Go to Rhapsody.com and find a song that you would like. Now don’t use the pop-out player to play the song. This is what you should be using to play the song:
Play the song and you will see something pop-up beside the player saying “Download this audio” looking like this:
Click “Download This Audio” and select the song you would like to download. This should work for any song on Rhapsody.
If you would like to use this program to download videos IDM will do that too. Unlike most other video downloading programs such as AntToolbar (a firefox addon) or MP4 Downloader (another Firefox addon), IDM can download videos from any source. YouTube, MegaVideo and even flash videos. To download videos with IDM just go to the website where the videos are and start playing the video. Once the video starts playing you should see a little box similar to the one you will see for downloading music pop-up at the top of the video that says “Download this Video”. If you click it then you will be able to download the video as a .flv file. Can’t play .flv files? no problem, check out Videora iPod Converter. Videora lets you convert .FLV files into iPod friendly formats, .mp4. As far as I know you can also use Videora to convert .flv files to a viewing size for regular screens, i.e not your iPod Nano’s, but I’ve never tried it so I couldn’t tell you for sure.
Well it’s been awhile since I posted on here, I just really haven’t had anything to post about until now.
A few days ago I got my regular PC World Daily Tech News email, and the first news story caught my eye. Snow Leopard Is a Pale Imitation of Windows 7. Wow. I never thought that I would be hearing that.
I remember awhile ago when a lot of people were complaining that “Vista was a copy of the Mac OS”. Now the tables have turned, or at least, they’re trying, but all of the Mac fanboys and girls are trying to hold it right there. Check out some of the comments at the bottom of that article. I can almost see all of those people writing those comments from their Mac computers. I only went about half-way down the page, but all I read up to that point was slams against the author by Mac fanboys. And people say PC fanboys are bad, ha! This is ridiculous! I do have to agree with the author though. Apple is bringing new features to it’s operating system, but 64 bit? we’ve had that since Vista. If you would like to see the new features Snow Leopard is adding Head over to the Apple website. I have to say that I’m kinda disappointed in Apple this time though. I’m looking for something revolutionary. They give us “improved iChat”. Here I want you to all see a few comic strips I found awhile back.
This comic talks about games, but I think it can be related to general PC-Mac conversations also. Especially this one.
This was an image I found awhile ago during the big debate about how Vista had “copied” some of OS X’s features. Now I’m not going to say that it’s the other way around now, I don’t think that Apple is copying any of Windows’ features, but I do think they are lagging a little behind in their features, and now are trying to catch up. This is exactly what happened with Vista. Windows lagged behind in an area, and when Microsoft tried to fix it they got branded for copying Apple’s design. Now that Apple is fallen behind and are trying to fix it, they are being branded as copying Windows. It’s a vicious cycle.
I would like to finish this post with a quote.
What we’ve had so far has all been nice-a kind of placeholder-but now the professionals are coming.
-Clay Shirky
