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Swimming pools around Shanghai are checking liquids:
“Pool guests who bring these items must allow them to be opened and inspected. Security personnel will smell them to see whether they are safe or not,” a separate report posted on the city’s sport bureau’s website said (www.shsports.gov.cn).
The stupidity is beyond words.
This article claims that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army was behind, among other things, the August 2003 blackout:
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.
This is all so much nonsense I don’t even know where to begin.
I wrote about this blackout already: the computer failures were caused by Blaster.
The “Interim Report: Causes of the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada,” published in November and based on detailed research by a panel of government and industry officials, blames the blackout on an unlucky series of failures that allowed a small problem to cascade into an enormous failure.
The Blaster worm affected more than a million computers running Windows during the days after Aug. 11. The computers controlling power generation and delivery were insulated from the Internet, and they were unaffected by Blaster. But critical to the blackout were a series of alarm failures at FirstEnergy, a power company in Ohio. The report explains that the computer hosting the control room’s “alarm and logging software” failed, along with the backup computer and several remote-control consoles. Because of these failures, FirstEnergy operators did not realize what was happening and were unable to contain the problem in time.
Simultaneously, another status computer, this one at the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, a regional agency that oversees power distribution, failed. According to the report, a technician tried to repair it and forgot to turn it back on when he went to lunch.
To be fair, the report does not blame Blaster for the blackout. I’m less convinced. The failure of computer after computer within the FirstEnergy network certainly could be a coincidence, but it looks to me like a malicious worm.
The rest of the National Journal article is filled with hysterics and hyperbole about Chinese hackers. I have already written an essay about this—it’ll be the next point/counterpoint between Marcus Ranum and me for Information Security—and I’ll publish it here after they publish it.
EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Wired debunked this claim pretty thoroughly:
This time, though, they’ve attached their tale to the most thoroughly investigated power incident in U.S. history.” and “It traced the root cause of the outage to the utility company FirstEnergy’s failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines in Ohio. When the power lines were ensnared by the trees, they tripped.
[…]
So China…using the most devious malware ever devised, arranged for trees to grow up into exactly the right power lines at precisely the right time to trigger the cascade.
Large-scale power outages are never one thing. They’re a small problem that cascades into series of ever-bigger problems. But the triggering problem were those power lines.
Great article from Rolling Stone.
Interesting investigative article from Business Week on Chinese cyber espionage against the U.S. government, and the government’s reaction.
When the deluge began in 2006, officials scurried to come up with software “patches,” “wraps,” and other bits of triage. The effort got serious last summer when top military brass discreetly summoned the chief executives or their representatives from the 20 largest U.S. defense contractors to the Pentagon for a “threat briefing.” BusinessWeek has learned the U.S. government has launched a classified operation called Byzantine Foothold to detect, track, and disarm intrusions on the government’s most critical networks. And President George W. Bush on Jan. 8 quietly signed an order known as the Cyber Initiative to overhaul U.S. cyber defenses, at an eventual cost in the tens of billions of dollars, and establishing 12 distinct goals, according to people briefed on its contents. One goal in particular illustrates the urgency and scope of the problem: By June all government agencies must cut the number of communication channels, or ports, through which their networks connect to the Internet from more than 4,000 to fewer than 100. On Apr. 8, Homeland Security Dept. Secretary Michael Chertoff called the President’s order a cyber security “Manhattan Project.”
It can only help for the U.S. government to get its own cybersecurity house in order.
This won best-paper award at the First USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats: “Designing and implementing malicious hardware,” by Samuel T. King, Joseph Tucek, Anthony Cozzie, Chris Grier, Weihang Jiang, and Yuanyuan Zhou.
Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.
We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker, rather than designing one speci?c attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such ?exible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including a login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more flexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest.
Theoretical? Sure. But combine this with stories of counterfeit computer hardware from China, and you’ve got yourself a potentially serious problem.
My guess is that it’s the Chinese government.
Among their conclusions are that the majority of malware distribution sites are hosted in China, and that 1.3% of Google searches return at least one link to a malicious site. The lead author, Niels Provos, wrote, ‘It has been over a year and a half since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. During the course of our research, we have investigated not only the prevalence of drive-by downloads but also how users are being exposed to malware and how it is being distributed.'”
Draft paper, and some data.
What in the world is going on here?
Foreign hackers, primarily from Russia and China, are increasingly seeking to steal Americans’ health care records, according to a Department of Homeland Security analyst.
Mark Walker, who works in DHS’ Critical Infrastructure Protection Division, told a workshop audience at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that the hackers’ primary motive seems to be espionage.
Espionage? Um, how?
Walker said the hackers are seeking to exfiltrate health care data. “We don’t know why,” he added. “We want to know why.” At the same time, he said, it’s clear that “medical information can be used against us from a national security standpoint.”
How? It’s not at all clear to me.
Any health problems among the nation’s leaders would be of interest to potential enemies, he said.
This just has to be another joke.
EDITED TO ADD (3/13): More Posted on February 20, 2008 at 12:30 PM • View Comments
The 2007 International Privacy Ranking.
Canada comes in first.
Individual privacy is best protected in Canada but under threat in the United States and the European Union as governments introduce sweeping surveillance and information-gathering measures in the name of security and border control, an international rights group said in a report released Saturday.
Canada, Greece and Romania had the best privacy records of 47 countries surveyed by London-based watchdog Privacy International. Malaysia, Russia and China were ranked worst.
Both Britain and the United States fell into the lowest-performing group of “endemic surveillance societies.”
EDITED TO ADD (1/10): Actually, Canada comes in second.
Time Magazine article on Chinese hackers:
But reports in Chinese newspapers suggest that the establishment of a cybermilitia is well under way. In recent years, for example, the military has engaged in nationwide recruiting campaigns to try to discover the nation’s most talented hackers. The campaigns are conducted through competitions that feature large cash prizes, with the PLA advertising the challenges in local newspapers.
Tan is a successful graduate of this system. He earned $4,000 in prize money from hacker competitions, enough to make him worthy of a glowing profile in Sichuan University’s campus newspaper. Tan told the paper that he was at his happiest “when he succeeds in gaining control of a server” and described a highly organized selection and training process that aspiring cybermilitiamen (no cyberwomen, apparently) undertake. The story details the links between the hackers and the military. “On July 25, 2005,” it said, “Sichuan Military Command Communication Department located [Tan] through personal information published online and instructed him to participate in the network attack/defense training organized by the provincial military command, in preparation for the coming Chengdu Military Command Network Attack/Defense Competition in September.” (The State Council Information Office didn’t respond to questions about Tan, and China’s Foreign Ministry denies knowing about him.)
With the help of experts from Sichuan University, the story continued, Tan’s team won the competition and then had a month of intense training organized by the provincial military command, simulating attacks, designing hacking tools and drafting network-infiltration strategies. Tan was then chosen to represent the Sichuan Military Command in competition with other provinces. His team won again, after which, the iDefense reports say, he founded the NCPH and acquired an unidentified benefactor (“most likely the PLA”) to subsidize the group’s activities to the tune of $271 a month.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.