Feral Jundi

Monday, November 29, 2010

Technology: China Used Cyber Privateers In Attack Against Google

     The hack was part of a computer sabotage campaign carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. This has been going on since at least 2002, the cable said.

     I read this and the first thing that popped out at me was that China was contracting with private industry to attack an enemy in cyber space (the commons).  In this case, that enemy was Google.

     Also, just look at the list of folks they contracted with, and you wonder how is this not cyber privateering?  Perhaps the Chinese understand the concept of ‘creating an industry out of destroying your enemies’, much better than the west. It is also the Chinese who are doing this, and not some poor third world country.

     So this is the next thought that came to mind.  If China is doing this, then why couldn’t the US use the same tool of cyber warfare against the Chinese, or even against a group like Wikileaks?  Hell, we can even be open about it and issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal to individuals and companies in order to make this happen. Just a thought, and hey, China is doing it. lol –Matt

Chinese Government Ordered Hack on Google Servers: Wikileaks

By Clint Boulton2010-11-29

Wikileaks gave the New York Times a diplomatic cable that shows the Chinese government was responsible for the hack on Google’s Gmail system.

China’s government was indeed behind the hack on Google’s Gmail system earlier this year according to a cable captured by the controversial Wikileaks organization.

Wikileaks, which butters its bread collecting secret documents and seeding them in media outlets, snagged 250,000 American diplomatic cables dating back three years and released some of them to the New York Times and other media outlets.

The Times cited one of the cables as proof that “China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January.”

The hack was part of a computer sabotage campaign carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. This has been going on since at least 2002, the cable said.

A Google spokesperson told eWEEK: “We aren’t going to be able to comment. As you know, since we revealed this incident in January, we haven’t been speculating as to the parties responsible.”

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

China: The Cyberwar Between Google and China

Filed under: China,Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Matt @ 5:59 AM

   Interesting deal between Google and China.  Although the real winner here will be China’s search engine called Baidu.  You can bet that any telecom stuff that Google was planning on doing in China, will probably suffer as well.

   The real story though, is the whole concept of a mega corporation like Google, taking on a super power like China?  Thomas Ricks was pretty intrigued by the concept as well.  Time to break out the pre-Westphalia rule book, and start implementing cyber privateer hacking to go after these state sponsored hackers. –Matt

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Security specialist ‘has evidence of Chinese attack on Google’

A US computer expert says he has found the ‘digital fingerprints’ of Chinese authors on the tools used to launch recent attacks against Google

By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor20 Jan 2010

Joe Stewart, a security specialist with SecureWorks in the US, told the New York Times that he had analysed the software used to attack Google, and found that the main program used by the hackers contained a module based on an algorithm that appeared in a Chinese technical document that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites.

Google last week announced that the accounts of human rights activists and political dissidents had been hacked, and that it believed the attacks had originated from China. However, details about the precise nature of the attacks were not revealed, although security experts broadly agreed that Google was probably correct in its suspicions.

It is thought that a Trojan virus, known as Hydraq, was responsible for opening a “back door” in to compromised computers, which could then be used by hackers to access and take control of a machine without the owner’s permission or knowledge.

Stewart uses a method known as a “reverse engineering” to unravel malicious software, viruses and Trojans to identify how and where they originated. He looks for patterns in the code, and for unusual algorithms used by hackers to error-check transmitted data.

However, Stewart said that he could not rule out the possibility that the programmers behind the Google hack had laid a false trail that pointed to Chinese involvement in order to disguise the fact they originated from another country or government.

“But Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is probably the best one,” he told the New York Times.

Story here.

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Hackers create opportunity for military firms

Attacks on Google boost the market for cyber-security just as government weapons spending is expected to slow. Military firms are retooling for rising demand by corporations as well as government.

By W.J. Hennigan

January 19, 2010

For U.S. military firms, the latest revelations of highly sophisticated hacker attacks on Google Inc. are highlighting a new reality, and a potentially lucrative business: The battlefield is shifting to cyberspace.

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Saturday, February 21, 2009

Kaizen: People Will Support What They Help To Create

Filed under: Building Snowmobiles,Industry Talk,Kaizen — Tags: , , , — Matt @ 4:59 PM

    Hey everyone, this is a treat. I wanted to expand on a interesting conversation in the comments section, that I think deserves it’s own home.  This is from the article called The Importance of Shared Reality. –Matt

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 Matt

     Been thinking about your post while hiking the Laotian trail–more about that later.  Since we are using the auto industry as a source of metaphor for organizational best practices, I thought we might hyper-link to another–the Saturn Car Company concept.  Remember the original GM logic for creating Saturn–they realized that they had gotten too big, and too bueracratic to compete with the smaller more nimble company’s–like Toyota.  So GM selected 99 people (“the Group of 99”) and turned them loose to identify key founding principles for a new organization (Saturn) and to search the world for the best ideas in all key areas. The group consisted of a functional cross-section of people, including plant managers, superintendents, union committee members, production workers, and skilled tradesmen, as well as 41 UAW locals(which is fascinating because one of their findings was to scrap the Union model) and GM staff from 55 GM plants. 

     The group split into seven coss-functional teams to explore stamping; metal fabrication and body work; paint and corrosion; trim and hardware; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; and powertrain and chassis. In all, the Group of 99 visited 49 GM plants and 60 other companies around the world (shared reality). They made 170 contacts, traveled two million miles, and put in 50,000 hours of interviews and visits (listening to the guys on the ground). 

     The group’s findings were presented in April 1984. The keys to success identified included ownership by all employees, the assumption of responsibility by all, equality and trust among employees, the elimination of barriers to doing a good job including the union, giving staff the authority to do their jobs, and the existence of common goals. Specific recommendations included the formation of consensus-driven partnerships within work teams as well as between the union and company management. 

     Although initially a mega-success, Higher Headquarters eventually reigned Saturn back in and squashed their entrepenuerial decision-making and management methods, the lesson still stands as a precient model for how a large organization can reinvent itself to stary nimble, and stay competitive.  

     I believe that the Saturn Car Company model is what USSOCOM needs to follow in order to stay nimble and meet the challenges of modern day–I hate to use the word but I have to–assymetrical warfare.

 What think you? –Pete 

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Pete,

 

    Laos would be a cool country to check out, and I certainly would like to hear those stories. As for your question, I hope I can do it some justice.  It is something that all companies in my industry can learn from, and any ideas about how to better organize and manage a company should be listened to and studied.  The concept of Group 99 is intriguing, and it has certainly kicked in the thought machine within my head. I also wanted to make this answer for you, more reader friendly, and include a historical base as well.  So you will have to pardon the beginning here, because this is me just priming the pump for the reader.   

     The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) or what I will call SOCOM was originally created out of the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw(the failed Iran hostage rescue mission), and I think it is important to look at this first.  The investigation of this incident, chaired by Admiral James L. Holloway III, cited lack of command and control and inter-service coordination as significant factors in the failure of that mission. So this is one side of the story. 

     The other side of the story, is the reality of what the Special Operations Forces (SOF) were up against. Whereas my belief is that the SOF community was getting the short end of the stick well before Operation Eagle Claw, and certainly were aware of these command and control issues. The guy on the ground was not being listened to, which is too bad.  It was classic conventional versus unconventional mindsets, and of course the bigger of the two will win.  So no one of importance or influence was really sold on the concept, and looked upon SOF with skepticism, all while gobbling up budget money for their projects.  “All of my forces are special” was the mindset, “and money needs to go to my tanks, jets, and large scale infantry forces”.  

     And Carter, when confronted with a situation that required a clean and sharp scalpel, to cut those hostages loose from Iranian control, looked to the military to solve his problem. Did they have a developed Special Operations capability, or were they too focused on tanks and planes?  No wonder things failed, but I put that responsibility on the top leaders who were not forward thinking enough to even acknowledge the potential for a situation like what happened in Iran. So this is where SOCOM came from, and what it’s purpose in life is–to prevent another Operation Eagle Claw and effectively manage today’s Special Operations community.

    Then over the years, they have done much to work on the command and control issues and inter-service coordination, and have conducted numerous missions all the way up to the present wars.  But really, the current wars are the true test of the effectiveness of SOCOM, and I think this is why a conversation like this even takes place.  The true test of an organization’s strengths is not when all is well, but when they are tested and pushed to it’s limits.  Much like how does a company like Toyota weather the storm during a bad economy?  

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