Bad Hacker Poker: China tips their hand

A standard, even boring, piece of Chinese military propaganda screened in mid-July included what must have been an unintended but nevertheless damaging revelation: shots from a computer screen showing a Chinese military university is engaged in cyberwarfare against entities in the United States.

The documentary itself was otherwise meant as praise to the wisdom and judgment of Chinese military strategists, and a typical condemnation of the United States as an implacable aggressor in the cyber-realm. But the fleeting shots of an apparent China-based cyber-attack somehow made their way into the final cut.

The screenshots appear as B-roll footage in the documentary for six seconds—between 11:04 and 11:10 minutes—showing custom-built Chinese software apparently launching a cyber-attack against the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, by using a compromised IP address belonging to a United States university. As of Aug. 22 at 1:30pm EDT, in addition to Youtube, the whole documentary is available on the CCTV website.

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I had to have a chuckle at this one, the famous Chinese hacker school managed to leak their own data to the world in a very public fashion. There have been lots of theories and ideas floating around as to what they are doing in the training center and it seems teaching about information leakage was not on the curriculum given that they showed unedited pictures of custom tools complete with compromised American university IP addresses and Falun Gong targets. Personally I hope this isn't just a one-off mistake but a overall statement about the processes and quality of teaching going on there; would make everyone's lives easier if all they could turn out for graduates were a bunch of script kiddies with no real skill beyond point-and-click "hacking" techniques.

Well doesn't that make things a little awkward, heh.

We have known that the Chinese have been hacking us for years. Hillary Clinton hinted at an all out war with China when she ran against Barack Obama and cited their current hacking as a good reason. The amount of money that is being lost to CHICOM is insane.

That's a epic whoops on their parts haha.... The U.S. I believe knows where an when they are being hacked by internal an external sources. In my opinion they are just stockpiling info/evidence to present in World Court after they sign legislature saying this is an act of war. The war with China is on the Horizon but the U.S, is just getting their final pieces/resources in place. Because let's face it this is going to be a war beyond the scope of anything we've seen, heard or read about and we need as many Countries to back us as possible against a country with over a Billion MORE people than the U.S. has.

Too funny and not surprising... Everytime china goes on one of their we didnt do it media blitz, you can feel the collective eyeroll.

This is up there with China rerouting web traaffic for an hour through some of their defense computers to capture data.