Some of us wonder about the future. We wonder what the future would be like if written by our favorite authors: William Gibson, Iain Banks, Jules Verne. The more cautious and knowledgeable warn against living in the worlds of Clive Barker, Jeff Noon, and Stephen King. Others argue about the dangers of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. What now seems to be the case is that we are living in the world of Tom Clancy and club-fingered gun fetishist Skip Woods.
It’s been revealed by the New York Times that America is under attack! By no less than the Chinese Army operating out an anonymous twelve-story building in a rundown unassuming suburb of Shanghai, Pudong. Luckily, Jason Bourne is on the case.
Except, there is no Jason Bourne. The U.S. government — despite investing billions into various spook shows, drone surveillance, and DAARPA projects — seem to have no clue how to counter this attack, let alone admit it’s even going on. While President Obama hinted at the breach in his State of the Union address recently, these hackers have been targeting the products of years of outsourcing and widening circles of supply chains.
Issue Potentially Caused By The New York Times’s Sloppy Reporting
On October 25 of last year, the New York Times ran a lengthy, front-loaded article by David Barboza accusing the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jaibao, of potentially using his family as catspaws to amass a gigantic fortune. The following day, the NYT had its site blocked in China.
Similarly, Bloomberg published an article on June 29 of 2012 describing the wealth accumulated by the family of Vice President Xi Jinping, who’s expected to become the country’s next top leader as general secretary of the Communist Party during the coming Party Congress in March. Since then, Bloomberg has also had its site blocked in China.
But, No, Not Really
On January 30, the NYT reported that Chinese hackers had been infiltrating its servers for the previous four months — since the story on Wen Jaibao had run the previous October — scraping corporate passwords of every one of its employees, breaking into the PCs of 53 of those workers. These hackers also infiltrated the email accounts of a couple of reporters who cover China, including David Barboza. Bloomberg News shortly followed suit in fessing up to having been compromised on January 31, with the Washington Post finally admitting its servers had also been compromised in 2012, following four years of attempts, on February 2.
Since 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting American news organizations as part of an effort to monitor coverage of Chinese issues (as opposed to paying for subscriptions like everybody else).
In a November 2011 intelligence report, government officials specifically accused China and Russia of stealing intellectual property for economic gain.
Who Da Mandiant?
The hacking story blew up on February 27, when Mandiant, a reclusive security company, decided to blow the whistle and give its findings to the New York Times.
A highly detailed 60-page study released by Mandiant tracked individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew”. Over the course of several investigations, Mandiant found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen emails, contacts, and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations and had maintained a “short list” of journalists for repeated attacks.
Mandiant provided an advance copy of its report to the New York Times, saying it hoped to “bring visibility to the issues addressed in the report.”
Kevin Mandia, founder and chief executive of Mandiant, told the New York Times that:
Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398 or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.
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