China's 5-Year Cyberwar Met With Western Silence

jfruhlinger writes "McAfee yesterday outlined what it calls Operation Shady RAT, a five-year campaign of cyberespionage launched by a national government against international organizations and private corporations. That government was almost certainly China's, so the question becomes: why are the Western nations silent about it? One fact revealed by the raids is that, predictions of cyberpunk novels nonwithstanding, private companies are still quite weak in the face of national governments — and it's those national governments that must act against such intrusions."

Why would retaliation be public

[wintercolby]

Come on now. IF the West has been secretly attacked, why would it/we launch a PUBLIC attack in retaliation. I'd be inclined to believe that there are constant "cyber attacks" in both directions. I'd say you'd be a fool not to believe that there is retaliation of some sort, after stuxnet.

Chinese students

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at a fairly large mid-western university and my experience was the Chinese government was sponsoring kids who came to the US to learn how to hack. I was responsible for network security for the engineering and CS building's network and saw many attempts at hacking by Chinese students within the network and directed outward to the Internet. No one in the university was interested in taking action against these students when incontrovertible evidence was collected and offered. Faculty were defending the hackers and administration largely supported faculty so there were no sanctions. I don't know if these students were directed to this behavior but there was certainly a culture which was pervasive among these Chinese students that you did not see among other groups of international students from places like India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Mideast, the former Soviet republics and/or eastern Europe.

Re:I would think the answer is obvious...

[nomadic]

More importantly from our perspective, their economic health depends on ours. China needs us to import their goods or their economy grinds to a halt.

Hacker call-to-arms

[w1nt3rmute]

It sounds to me like this is an opportunity for US hackers to give the Fox News Twitter account a rest and do something for their country... I don't know about the rest of you, but at least 2/3'rds of the hack attempts we see on our servers come from IPs originating in China. It's like every restaurant has a box in the kitchen scanning for exploits. Maybe it's state-sponsored and maybe it's not, but China is a haven for hackers that seem to focus specifically on theft of classified technological and military information and intellectual property. This is a fact and it's been common knowledge long before this particular news story broke. It's also common knowledge that China influences economic and foreign policy in this country. It's been that way going back 20+ years to the days of Most-Favored Nation (MFN) status and it's worse now that China is the #1 investor in US Treasuries. I suspect that makes it pretty hard for the US Government to mount any kind of meaningful retaliation against the Chinese. But clandestine hacking groups are under no such restrictions. Maybe US-based members of hacking groups such as Anonymous and others should stop slipping porn vids onto YouTube and DDoS'ing Australia for a few months and focus on tracking and sabotaging hackers in China in retaliation. Kind of like a modern-day cyber militia defending the virtual homestead. Call it Project AybabtUS.