Chinese Websites Used As Launchpads For Cracking

[Kintaro]

There has been a recent article by The Washington Post, titled Hackers Attack Via Chinese Web Sites. The article was covered on Slashdot's article Websites Used As Launchpads For Cracking.

There are a number of possibilies and speculation surrounding this including that it could be terrorists, it could be the chinese (sounds obvious), and in fact it could be related to Microsoft. The software giant gave The People's Republic of China (PRC) the source code to its operating systems through its shared source program. This could allow the PRC to find unfixed and unnoticed security flaws in the giant's software. Also the People's Liberation Army (PLA) have been reported by the Pentagon to be developing "information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, and tactics to protect friendly computer systems and networks," the report said.

However the factor remains that China has for a long time been used as a stepping stone in attacks from crackers. This may not account for all of the attacks, but anyone who logs attempts on their firewalls or SSH servers, anywhere in the world who are connected to the Internet a large amount of the time will notice intrusion attempts from netblocks within China.

[Kintaro]

Further evidence: http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160044&cid=13397317

[toadlife]

I doubt if there is some big consipracy by China's government. I get hits on my router's ssh all the time from china. They are from owned linux boxes. When I stick the IP in my browser, I almost allways see the "welcome to apache" page.

[Kintaro]

Yeah, I get that a lot myself. Possibly an attempt by the defence department to gain more control over what is considered Classified probably./