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July 14, 2008

Schneier on chinese cyber attacks

There's an interesting post on Bruce Schneier's blog, arguing that

The popular media conception is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers -- military, government corporate -- and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated...These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.

The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living..And some of the hackers are good. Over the years, they have become more sophisticated in both tools and techniques. They're stealthy. They do good network reconnaissance. My guess is what the Pentagon thinks is the problem is only a small percentage of the actual problem.[...]

If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.

In this regard, they're more like a non-state actor.

One thing to draw out from Scheier's post is the possibility that - because these groups are functioning like non-state actors - their cyber attacks could be made considerably more effective. Loose networks of hackers can afford to try a lot of different things - some of which will be prospectively and/or retrospectively stupid - and give nodes in the network considerable autonomy.

Such networks are robust enough to risk the loss of a number of nodes, and to risk serious failures: by doing this, they are more able to innovate than would otherwise be the case, and can become extremely problematic for state actors.

Posted by jon_mendel at July 14, 2008 04:18 PM

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