China's computers at hacking risk

China's computers at hacking risk

news.bbc.co.uk

Every PC in China could be at risk of being taken over by malicious hackers because of flaws in compulsory government software.

The potential faults were brought to light by Chinese computer experts who said the flaw could lead to a "large-scale disaster".

The Chinese government has mandated that all computers in the country must have the screening software installed.

It is intended to filter out offensive material from the net.

(visit the link for the full news article)

A very interesting article here. The Chinese government is forcing everyone to have a censorship program on their machine. This is disgusting enough, but now people have realized that doing this could turn into a giant cyber-threat if flaws in the software are found. If the software is poorly made (And what software do you know that runs well 100% of the time?), then a hacker could possibly take control of all the computers in China.

Perhaps this is the plan? China themselves could use this software to take control of all computers and cyber-attack their enemies. This would be similar to the suspicious events where Estonia was attacked, and many blamed Russia.

en.wikipedia.org...

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

I've heard many people in the past say that China is more of a future planner than many other nations, and this kind of thing would be a serious plan if that is indeed what it is, what with our future likely being so dependent on the Internet and other technologies.

This article is very interesting to throw into the mix:

www.hindu.com...

Hackers who attack defence or commercial computers in the US and UK in future may be in for a surprise: a counterattack, authorised and carried out by the police and defence agencies that aims to disrupt and even knock them off the net.

The secret plans, prompted by the explosion in the number of computer-crime incidents from east Asia targeting commercially or politically sensitive information, are known as "strikeback", and are intended to target hackers' computers and disrupt them, in some cases involving denial of service attacks.

According to well-placed sources, work on "strikeback" has already begun in the UK, with the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and London's Metropolitan police's (the Met) e-crime unit working to deploy teams. The measures are being adopted because of the unprecedented level of attacks being suffered from hacking groups in China, Russia and North Korea, which are suspected of being state sponsored.

It sounds like we are not going to take attacks lightly, if true, it's very interesting that Soca/Met are involved in this strikeback, I would expect that to be more the realm of the intelligence services, as it's not domestic, and potentially illegal, even in self defense.

Just asked a friend who *knows* a lot about these things.

He said "Some hackers are *f***ing with the Chinese systems. A sort of payback and message"

May not be true. May just be an unsubstantiated rumour. But may be true.

Mike

[edit on 12-6-2009 by mmiichael]