Google has openly warned China that it is about to take its toys and go home, in the wake of disclosure that Chinese-based cyber attacks against Google email servers have been targeted against human rights activists.
Maybe they are operating under the misapprehension that China cares what they do? Nevertheless, it is always good to see a large American high technology company come to its senses -- and for all the right reasons.
In unrelated developments, the Iranian Cyber Army launched a DNS "who's your daddy" attack on China's indigenous search engine, Baidu, and made it cry alone in the closet for about four hours -- and you can bet they cared about that one.
In naval warfare terms, which are often usefully applied to cyber warfare, both of these items describe what is called a "shot across the bow."
China needs to think this through very carefully. In America, we've got fourteen year old kids with smoking hot Linux boxes, pipes of light, and enough creativity to take down national C3 infrastructure for keeps.
China needs to think this through very carefully. In America, we've got fourteen year old kids with smoking hot Linux boxes, pipes of light, and enough creativity to take down national C3 infrastructure for keeps.
4 reader comments:
Way to go Google!!
As you predict:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/6977571/Haiti-earthquake-major-catastrophe-as-dozens-feared-dead.html
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php
China needs to think this through very carefully. In America, we've got fourteen year old kids with smoking hot Linux boxes, pipes of light, and enough creativity to take down national C3 infrastructure for keeps.
I think they're very careful. Careful not to disrupt the tens of millions of botnet PC's in China -- except where public relations demands it -- not to mention tens of millions more owned from the PRC outside their borders. Their single biggest competitor in this is the Russian Mafia. Our bad boys are lightweights by comparison.
China seems to tolerate and encourage its hackers. Linux is their national OS; here, it's Windows which encourages inept script-kiddies. The real hackers here mostly use Unix-like OS's have long been scapegoated by law enforcement and the media.
The official policy in the US seems to be: encourage academically trained professionals in digital technologies by rewarding them with government jobs (or the companies that might employ them, with no-bid contracts); publicly revile all self-taught or dissident "hackers", no matter how benign or brilliant they are.
No question: the Russians have the skills and are respected, but don't sell our boys short. If the Chinese want to go high noon.... well, good luck to them. I just don't know what's going to happen to their economy if all of a sudden their traffic can't get off the Mainland. Talk to themselves, I guess? Maybe they'll be happier that way.
They can have a zillion PCs, all talking to each other, but not one single packet leaves their lands until we say it can. In this game, the one with the most routers wins.
They can have a zillion PCs, all talking to each other, but not one single packet leaves their lands until we say it can. In this game, the one with the most routers wins.
Yup. And the US Government has more computing power, perhaps, than the rest of the world combined (most of it classified). Imagine what Echelon could do, if a small fraction of its petaflops and connectivity were used for a DDOS. The Chinese internet could be made into a hermetically sealed infranet in a few minutes or hours -- with as many trap doors as needed, just to keep an eye on them.
This is one of the few things that America still has the upper hand in. Officially, we only mostly control the internet. If push came to shove, we could make it work just how and for whom we intended it too. I sure hope that never happens, though.
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