Cyber Warfare II News, Pics, Views

Ultra

Junior Member
Interesting read, the complexity and sophiscation NSA is able to muster is something China can only dream of. I think currently China's cyber effort is no more than just script kiddie level. Cyber warfare is about attack AND defence. The quality of their cyber units can be infered from the quality of their anti-virus companies - and the chinese don't even have a decent anti-virus firm. The two top antivirus companies in China are
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The russians by comparison has one of the best viral research firm in the world -
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I think if China wants to be taken even slightly seriously, they need to step up their game.



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Equation Group: The Crown Creator of Cyber-Espionage

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NSA has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Commercial industries and the government are two different animals. I don't think the Chinese government likes to brag about what they know. Also if you take accusations of Chinese cyber espionage seriously, how is it that China is able to steal everything as accused, while outsiders seem to be surprised at Chinese developments. If the Chinese weren't sophisticated, why would the NSA have to be? And remember China has to buy foreign hardware yet people are still surprised by Chinese developments.
 

Ultra

Junior Member
Commercial industries and the government are two different animals. I don't think the Chinese government likes to brag about what they know. Also if you take accusations of Chinese cyber espionage seriously, how is it that China is able to steal everything as accused, while outsiders seem to be surprised at Chinese developments. If the Chinese weren't sophisticated, why would the NSA have to be? And remember China has to buy foreign hardware yet people are still surprised by Chinese developments.



In all of the attacks the US government consistantly deny any critical data or material were stolen. Remember the US went through the cold war with the best rival they have ever met - the Russians who were able to penetrate deeply and stolen a lot of critical data consistantly during the cold war when the US security was at its highest. The US security procedures evolved as a result where they compartmentalized everything and they do regular blue-team vs red-team excercises to find out their own weaknesses and improve upon it.


If China are so good at stealing - why didn't they steal any engine design? Why are they still having trouble with their engine design?


Also, the talent pool is fluid - if China has some of the best hackers/cyber security experts in the world then why aren't we hearing about them? Are ALL OF THEM being employed by the government? If that's the case then China has incredibly tiny pool of talent. The fact of the matter is - like every industry, only a small fraction of talented people go work for the government, the majority work in civilian sector, and the quality of these talent (who came out of the same school) can be observed from the civilian sector.

And so far the chinese civilian sector is third rated at best.
 

Ultra

Junior Member
Commercial industries and the government are two different animals. I don't think the Chinese government likes to brag about what they know. Also if you take accusations of Chinese cyber espionage seriously, how is it that China is able to steal everything as accused, while outsiders seem to be surprised at Chinese developments. If the Chinese weren't sophisticated, why would the NSA have to be? And remember China has to buy foreign hardware yet people are still surprised by Chinese developments.


I might also add that - the US military often plays up the "China threat" in order to get more government funding. All the "Chinese hacking threat" are all incredibly vague - they never really talk about it in detail. This is because they aren't worthy of discussion and since US military has to keep up the "chinese threat" facade in order to get money, it has to be vague and lie about it. On the other hand when a worthy opponent (such as the Russians) actually made some actual headway penetrated US security - they can't stop talking about it in minute details. eg. Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Earl Edwin Pitts, John Anthony Walker, George Trofimoff, William Kampiles, Harold James Nicholson....etc etc. The fact of the matter is if China is actually a serious cyber threat the US military would not be so vague about it.
 
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Equation

Lieutenant General
I

If China are so good at stealing - why didn't they steal any engine design? Why are they still having trouble with their engine design?
.

And yet if the US is so good at hacking that they still couldn't get their hands on China's DF-21D ASBM, the DF-31 or even the WU-14 HGV. You know because the US has engine trouble when their HGV keeps on exploding.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Remember the "I Love You" virus and how it spread across the world? People to this day are in denial that it was started by someone in the Philippines even though evidence leads there. The mainstream media is not going to give credit to such feats because of prejudice. Like they would advertise anything else? The Recent Blue Anthem hack was said to be come from China. So since the Chinese are not too intelligent in such things, it must mean the system at the Blue Anthem end wasn't secure. Which begs the question, Why didn't the Russians, who seem to be behind a lot of cyber economic crimes, get there before China?
 

Ultra

Junior Member
I guess maybe I am not as well inform as I believe I am.
BTW, I just found the news now that China is building its own quantum encryption network.



China builds computer network impenetrable to hackers



China is building the world’s first long-distance quantum encryption network, a 1,200-mile line between Beijing and Shanghai that will be theoretically unhackable

By
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, Hefei
5:34PM GMT 07 Nov 2014

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will soon have the world's most secure major computer network, making communications between Beijing and Shanghai impenetrable to hackers and giving it a decisive edge in its quiet cyberwar with the United States.

In two years' time, a fibre-optic cable between the two cities will transmit quantum encryption keys that can completely secure government, financial and military information from eavesdroppers.

"We learnt after the Edward Snowden affair that we are always being hacked," said Prof Pan Jianwei, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, who is leading the project.

"Since most of the products we buy come from foreign companies, we wanted to accelerate our own programme," he added. "This is very urgent because
classical encryption was not invented in China, so we want to develop our own technology."

The £60 million cable, which is being funded by the central government and has been supported by the Central Military Commission, will initially mostly be used for money transfers by ICBC, the world's largest bank.

However, Prof Pan said eventually all communications in China, down to storing photographs on cloud servers, could feature quantum encryption.

"Ten years ago it was not so easy to get sufficient funding to support theoretical research, but since 2006 and 2007 when the economy really went well, they have been putting more money into research and then it really sped up," he said.

Half an hour's drive away from Prof Pan's office, at Quantum Communications Technology, a company spun out of the university to commercialise the technology, the importance of the project is clear. On the walls are framed photographs of visits from almost all of China's top leaders, including president Xi Jinping.

A huge video screen shows 56 terminals across the city that are already using quantum encryption. Currently, anyone wanting to send a secret message over the internet encrypts their communications so that only someone with the right code at the other end can unlock it.

But the US National Security Agency reportedly has computers powerful enough to crack encryption codes and is developing a quantum computer that will be able to run calculations so quickly that it can easily defeat encryption.

That means that, if it is able to tap fibre-optic cables and copy data travelling down the line, its hackers should be able to unlock the information.

Quantum encryption relies upon writing the encryption codes, or keys, upon single photons of light (a quantum particle). If a hacker tries to eavesdrop on the line, they will disturb the encoding of the photon and be detected. Consequently, said Prof Pan, it should provide perfect security.

"Of course, although quantum communication can in principle provide absolute security, in practice, we have to prove it thoroughly by various hacking tests. So we are inviting the finest hackers to attack our system," he said.

"The Chinese are really pushing the boundaries," said Raymond Laflamme, the head of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada. "They are moving at an incredible rate. No one else around the world has plans that are this ambitious."

"China is putting itself in the position of having secure private information that other countries will not be able to tap," he added.

At least six other networks transmitting quantum encryption keys have been built around the world, including one run by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in Massachusetts. But all are on a much smaller scale.

China's progress, which will also include the launch in 2016 of a satellite dedicated to quantum communication research, is likely to trigger a global race.

"We heard Nasa is building a quantum line between Los Angeles and San Francisco," said Prof Pan. "And IBM and Google are both investing heavily."

However, Prof Pan and Prof Laflamme said the development of the quantum system still required a great deal of work. Photons can only travel for a short distance, which means the new Beijing to Shanghai line will include 20 nodes, each of which is vulnerable to hackers. And the rate of transmitting keys remains slow.

"At the moment, it is only useful for a large user, like a government,” said Prof Pan.

Additional reporting by Tang Ailin


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