Titan Rain

[AngelicKnight]

"Titan Rain" seems to be the codename of a perceived attack towards US government computers (primarily the Pentagon) from Chinese networks.

Sounds interesting. Evidently the point of division right now is among those who believe it's an attack from the Chinese government and those who think it's merely hackers using insecure Chinese networks to their advantage.

Here's the actual story.

Any thoughts?

[Katja]

One word: propaganda...

The problem is that many Chinese networks are pretty insecure, mainly because they have so much problems getting the proper software to make them secure. Most of the software in China are very likely illegal copies of western software. And of course there's this huge language barrier that makes things a bit more complicated for administrators. If you're used to the Chinese script, reading plain English is a bit of a challenge. All those characters that in Chinese would just be combined to a single character. The addition of punctuation and spaces. No, it's not easy for a Chinese to learn proper English.
And thus network operators in China have to rely on either illegal software that might have been contaminated by viruses and other nasties or they have to use local, weaker software. So basically, these networks tend to be quite weak.

Still, the Great Firewall of China should offer them some protections from attacks from the outside world. Yet the Chinese Wall doesn't stop bandits within the wall's limits to wreak havok everywhere. And it is pretty likely that this is going on.

And don't forget all those Chinese people who are trying to bypass the Great Firewall through all kinds of means. They're almost asking to be hacked.

But of course, the Chinese government will also be interested in this modern technique and it wouldn't suprise me that the Chinese government, just like so many other countries and the USA, are employing cyberhackers to collect information about foreign nations this way...

Do you know what suprises me most? When China uses cyberhackers to hack into US-based sites, everyone starts crying "foul play". Everyone starts to become a bit hostile. Yet when the USA is employing cyberhackers to hack into Chinese sites, everyone just agrees with this all, and accepts it as one of those things that need to happen. Do I detect a double standard here or would people also complain this much if the US government was using American servers to hack into the Chinese government?

Reminds me of a joke about a woman who didn't want to have more than four kids because he heard one in 5 is Chinese.

[XTC46]

All those characters that in Chinese would just be combined to a single character. The addition of punctuation and spaces. No, it's not easy for a Chinese to learn proper English.

that is horribly stereotypical. and plain wrong. English is hard to learn, not becasue of the "many characters" and "spaces and punctuation" its becasue its a ****ed up language compared to most, with roots in many others, and then it was taken from another country, we added a bunch of crap, took out more, and made it into american (yes there is a HUGE difference between English and American, lol)

That is not even close to the reason there are so many insecure networks. We have TONS of insecure networks here in america and we speak the language fine (well enough anyway). Theur networks are insecure for the same reasons that ours are, bad security practices. They make the same mistakes our admins do (late patching, not patching, not following up with software updates, too much access to normal users, and the list goes on and on and on). To say the language barrier is the reason for this is just stupid. Most operating systems have language packs, which are free with the OS, and most computers i have seen out of asia have these installed. I worked at a university help desk in hawaii (where I live) and a HUGE amount of the computer I dealt with were in chinese/japanese/korean.

This has got to be one of the worst excuses I have ever heard for bad security "they couldnt RTFM" I mean ****, I know many System and Network admins out of asia (born and raised there) and they are damn good at what they do, I find it hard to believe that they are "special" and are some of the few that can read proper english.

Do you know what suprises me most? When China uses cyberhackers to hack into US-based sites, everyone starts crying "foul play"

how does this suprise you? this is the same way with everything america does. We want nukes but dont want anyone else to have them, we want spyplanes but get pissed at others for haviung them, we want satellites that can shoot down missles but are upset when others try the same thing and consider it hostile action. Why do we do this? the fact is if we went to war with china, we would lose. (actually everyone would lose, since it would probably go nuclear)

Youre damn right its a double standard, Its a perk of being the worlds last remianing "super power"

[NIKLAS?]

yup,china is growing pretty fast nowadays. if their
pace keeps this way, china will surpass america in many aspects space tchnology,economy, and please keep to mind of india. india has many expert in it,now they are emerging in medicine.be be ready to be surprised uncle sam