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ChineseHackers No Slackers - Violate Congressional Computers
by Susan Jones
Anyone surprised by story has likely been asleep since Mao died.
In a press conference held on June 11, U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf has made public that his office computers were hacked in August 2006 and that the FBI and other officials informed him that the attack came from inside China. Rep. Christopher Smith, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is also active in human rights affairs, said his computer had been attacked from inside China.
Hackers are hackers, no matter the country, though from what I have heard the Chinese actually pay their young'uns to pry into sensitive areas and report back. As the U.S. Government (and taxpayers have found) where there is a sub contract there's a way.
So what would Chinese hackers want from Congressmen's offices that they can simply steal from the Pentagon mainframe?
The computers in his office were being used by staff members working on human rights issues, which includes the names of dissidents, access to e-mail correspondence between his office and human rights groups and records from over 24 congressional hearings on human rights abuses.He reported that after one of the attacks, a car with Chinese officials plates went to the home of a Chinese dissident in the United States and photographed it.
And what with the Olympics coming up with its threats of embarrassing protests that's likely information the Chinese government would love to have.
Qualifying as the most amusing paragraph in the story is the Chinese Government's denial - it claims its such a backwater regime that it couldn't possibly have the technology to do it.
"... China is still a developing country. Does that mean we have already mastered such high-end technology? Personally I' don't believe that." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a news conference in Beijing.
Hard to believe from a country that's essentially the Captain Jack Sparrow of the copyright world.
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Susan Jones
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 05:34 on June 13th, 2008
I think most governments have, by now, realized the value of hackers, both in terms of cracking the systems of others and strenghtenign their own networks.