Re: China vs. U.S.: The cyber Cold War is raging

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 10:28 PM, Dave Paris <dparis () w3works com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com> wrote:
> > http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/28/technology/government_hackers/
> > (This is part four of a week-long series on the ecosystem of cybercrime)
> >
> > On April 8, 2010, traffic to about 15% of the world's websites was
> > rerouted to China.
> >
> > State-owned Internet company China Telecom tricked relays from around
> > the world into routing traffic through its servers for about 18
> > minutes.
> [...]
>
> Fat fingering and leaking a full internet routing table is hardly
> "tricking" - and it only affected peering providers who don't employ
> max prefix values on their peering sessions.
>
> While I cannot say whether this was purposefully done, I can say that
> ChinaTel is not the first, nor will they be the last to do this.  It's
> been done before by both domestic and international carriers & peers
> ..and will be done again by that same group.  Blindly attributing
> malice to every suspect action is no way to approach global
> networking.  Proof of intent goes a lot further than conjecture with
> those of us who see this kind of thing happen on global backbones as
> part of our jobs, rather than those who observe it from a protracted
> distance through glasses who see everything as a conspiracy.
The media is getting out of control with hype, and both the US and
Chinese are probably guilty as charged.

Did you read  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh:

On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on
an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over
the South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of
George W. Bush’s Administration. ...

The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of
reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A.-supplied operating system,
estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code,
according to a former senior intelligence official. Mastering it would
give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified
intelligence and operational data....

The U.S. realized the extent of its exposure only in late 2008. A few
weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a
group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with
a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security
officials and the former senior intelligence official told me. The
intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The
Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand. (“The N.S.A.
would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told
me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth
century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’
We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”)

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