Chinese Government at the Center of Five Cyber Attack Claims

It's not exactly the wind-up to World War III, but a curious war of words has erupted recently over alleged "cyber attacks" between China and several other nations. First, a wave of attacks in the UK, Germany, and the United States from Chinese-based computers had the Chinese foreign ministry issuing an official denial that their government had been involved. Then, officials from New Zealand reported that Chinese spies had been behind a recent spate of attacks on their computer systems, although no confidential information had been compromised. France then got into the game, stating that they too had experienced attacks on their systems, although they could not say with certainty that the Chinese government was directly involved.

The attacks, regardless of their exact origin or intent, naturally encouraged reprisals. Reuters reported recently that Chinese government computers have also come under attack. Lou Qinjian, China's Vice Minister of Information Industry, said that the attacks caused "massive damage"—no word on whether giant crabs were involved—and that his country's Internet infrastructure was "riddled with security holes that had made a mockery of the ruling Communist Party's censorship and exposed many secrets to spies."

So are there actual "cyber wars" going on between governments, intent on dealing massive damage to the infrastructure of other countries? Or is the entire affair simply the result of bored hackers on different continents? As with the recent cyber attack on Estonia by Russian hackers, the anonymous nature of the Internet makes finding the ringleaders of such attacks a difficult proposition at best. While it's easy to trace an IP to a particular computer, finding the operator of said computer requires some old-fashioned and tedious detective work.

Giacomo Paoni, the chief technical officer of the security firm WSLabi, said in a statement sent to Ars that Chinese ISPs may have been partially responsible for making these sorts of attacks so prevalent. "Internet Service Providers offering Bulletproof hosting—aka bulk-friendly hosting—have a high degree of tolerance as to what actions their customers can carry out," he said, "therefore they are usually used by attackers and spammers from all over the world as a good way to hide their tracks." However, this doesn't necessarily rule out government involvement. Paoni points out that China's ISPs also act as a "perfect shield" for digital espionage operations. Chinese military hackers have already drawn up wargame plans for attacks intended to disable US military assets such as carrier task forces in the event of a real war, so the idea of government-sponsored attacks is not out of the question.

The good news about these "cyber wars" is that the attacks have enabled the countries in question to identify and fix weak spots in their Internet infrastructure. Repairing security holes in operating systems and applications helps to defend against everyday hackers and spammers, who pose as much of a threat to our computerized world as foreign governments.



September 17, 2007