[HN Gopher] Critical entities targeted in suspected Chinese cybe...
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Critical entities targeted in suspected Chinese cyber spying
Author : shivbhatt
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-06-15 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| dang wrote:
| All: if you're going to comment on this story please make sure
| you're up on the site guidelines and that you're _not_ about to
| take the thread into generic political or nationalistic flamewar.
| Those things are beyond tedious, inevitably turn ugly, and are
| not what HN is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| echelon wrote:
| The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting
| to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is
| going to continue to escalate.
|
| Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible.
|
| Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time
| unthinkable.
|
| Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone.
| Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China
| downvoted.
|
| Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains
| and critical components).
|
| One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting
| criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there
| was hostility in the forums over China.
|
| On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up
| too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the
| G7 as The Last Supper.
|
| Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US.
|
| Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue
| escalating into more than just words?
| president wrote:
| Is it though? You don't hear about any of the Chinese malign
| activities on the mainstream media outside of the lab leak
| theory. On most social media you get deranked or chastised for
| bringing them up.
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, right here in the article we're discussing, we hear
| about Chinese hacking (from AP, which is very much mainstream
| media).
|
| Also today, on mainstream media, I saw an article about
| Chinese jet fighters and bombers encroaching (yet again) on
| Taiwan's airspace.
|
| So I think that, yes, you _do_ hear about Chinese malign
| activities on mainstream media, and not just the lab leak
| theory.
| ilamont wrote:
| The New York City subway hack referenced in the article is
| interesting. Unlike the many ransomware attacks targeting public
| infrastructure, The New York Times reported that economic
| espionage was a possible goal:
|
| _It is unclear why the M.T.A. was a target of the campaign, but
| investigators have several theories. One focuses on China's push
| to dominate the multibillion-dollar market for rail cars -- an
| effort that could benefit from knowing more about the inner
| workings of a transit system that awards lucrative contracts._
|
| However, the article also said it's possible "hackers mistakenly
| entered the M.T.A.'s system and discovered it was of little
| interest, which cybersecurity experts say is not unusual."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/nyregion/mta-cyber-attack...
| azurezyq wrote:
| I feel MTA is pretty badly managed and under-budgeted,
| absolutely not ideal for a case study even.
| fsflover wrote:
| Not sure why the commment by echelon is flagged. I think it's a
| reasonable observation:
|
| _The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are
| starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the
| rhetoric is going to continue to escalate.
|
| Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible.
|
| Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time
| unthinkable.
|
| Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone.
| Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China
| downvoted.
|
| Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains
| and critical components).
|
| One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting
| criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there
| was hostility in the forums over China.
|
| On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up
| too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the
| G7 as The Last Supper.
|
| Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US.
|
| Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue
| escalating into more than just words? _
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| Well, I think not all his observations are correct.
|
| >Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China
| downvoted.
|
| Fanboying of the CCP is usually downvoted. Useful or positive
| discussions about the country and culture aren't. Americans
| being overtly patriotic is still often controversial.
|
| >Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new
| one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over
| China.
|
| Sure is surprising that people don't want to buy stuff from a
| country that is throwing Uighurs in concentration camps, from a
| company that I recall was caught red handed putting spyware on
| devices they sold.
|
| Although I think the main reason the comment got flagged is
| that it isn't a HN style discussion, but looks more like
| someone from reddit getting lost and posting here
| dang wrote:
| Please don't copy-paste comments on HN, and certainly not to
| circumvent flagging. That's abusive.
|
| If you think a flagged comment shouldn't be flagged, you can
| vouch for it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch)
| or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
|
| In this case the comment was obviously a step into generic
| political and nationalistic flamewar and so was correctly
| flagged.
| [deleted]
| atarian wrote:
| I wonder if we'll start to see a transition back to
| analog/physical access.
| randomopining wrote:
| China, Russia, Iran, NK, maybe Turkey. Pact to chip away at the
| US sphere and take what they can. Classic zero sum. We should set
| this straight while we still have a chance.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| The long-term operational strategy of the CCP (and probably every
| other foreign hostile power) is clear. Backdoor all critical and
| vital systems. Keep finger on button. Presumably, our folks at
| the NSA are doing the same. This becomes the new MAD doctrine.
| magicsmoke wrote:
| It's not exactly like MAD because with MAD everyone has an
| accurate idea of how many nukes they have and the resulting
| destruction if they're exchanged. With cyberattacks you can't
| get an accurate idea of how backdoored your systems are,
| because if you did you would patch it. As a result, countries
| underestimate the damage they would take from retaliation and
| are more willing to use their collection of backdoors to create
| chaos at key moments. If nuclear MAD leans towards deterrence,
| cyberattacks lean towards escalation.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| There's also the question of attribution. Proxies and
| manipulated metadata can misdirect the retaliation onto a
| different actor.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Well, kinda.
|
| The actors have different playbooks. America's is "get in as
| quietly and as targeted as possible, and make the damage look
| like random equipment failing." Which makes sense. If they
| wanted to do value targeting at a wide scale they'd use a
| nuke or what have you. The mobility the domain of cyber gives
| them is deniability and operational security, not
| _capability_ since they can basically bomb anywhere on the
| planet in under an hour. The dragnet stuff is done via MITM
| attacks or with friendlies like telcom and tech companies.
|
| With the DPRK it's completely different. They don't have
| multiple points of access on the global internet. They don't
| have the worlds best military jets or satellites. Sure they
| have a few nukes, but they can be intercepted, so getting
| access to critical infrastructure is something they would
| value in the first minutes of a war with America.
|
| But I agree with your overall premiss. In cyber you can't get
| a _completely accurate_ idea of how backdoored your systems
| are. There is more observability here than people give credit
| for, because we hack the hackers to figure out their access
| levels then monitor the intruded on systems, but ultimately
| it 's unknowable just what percentage of our systems are
| compromised and even if we could somehow know the degree of
| compromization, it wouldn't matter because a previously
| unused, wormable 0day could infect whole classes of systems
| we thought were secure.
| mads wrote:
| Not sure why the commment by fsflower quoting echelon is
| downvoted. I think he points to reasonable observations by
| echelon:
|
| _The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are
| starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the
| rhetoric is going to continue to escalate.
|
| Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible.
|
| Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time
| unthinkable.
|
| Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone.
| Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China
| downvoted.
|
| Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains
| and critical components).
|
| One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting
| criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there
| was hostility in the forums over China.
|
| On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up
| too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the
| G7 as The Last Supper.
|
| Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US.
|
| Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue
| escalating into more than just words?_
| lazyeye wrote:
| Lab leak isnt plausible? Why is a rare virus appearing in the
| population, just down the road from a research facility which
| holds these kind of viruses, not plausible?
| dang wrote:
| Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521255.
| Copy/pasting a copy/pasted comment is beyond abusive. Please
| don't do anything like this on HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| m3kw9 wrote:
| At this point, can we safely suspect every important system is
| compromised at one point or another?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I'm not sure there was ever a time when every important system
| wasn't compromised in some way.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| By _at least one_ hostile power. Don 't assume that it's _only_
| one...
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Certainly seems every Intel CPU has been compromised for
| decades, right? I've not followed it super closely so maybe
| I'm missing something. We don't necessarily have exploits "in
| the wild" but someone in secret partnership with Intel could
| have gotten access to all kinds of things, it seems.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/D3fgS
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(page generated 2021-06-15 23:00 UTC)