Re: [iwar] Arab/Israeli "CyberWar" of our own making

From: B.K. DeLong (bkdelong@pobox.com)
Date: 2001-06-11 20:27:34


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From: "B.K. DeLong" <bkdelong@pobox.com>
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Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 23:27:34 -0400
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [iwar] Arab/Israeli "CyberWar" of our own making
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At 07:17 PM 06/11/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>The Israeli attackers are quite vocal.  They appear in newspaper
>interviews.  They use real names in many cases.  Israel has a far more
>closely controlled and smaller infrastructure and for more suerveillance
>capability per user than the US does.

I guess what bothers me most about your claims is that you don't give any 
proof. If you've read articles where attackers appear in newspaper 
interviews and use real names then post the URL or cut and paste the 
article. I should note that a lot of the US defacers (including pr0phet - 
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43134,00.html) have appeared in 
articles and as far as we know, they're still at-large.

But I will agree that there is no incentive to going after kids defacing 
Web sites of nations that have an unfriendly or hostile status with your 
country.

>The US can indeed exert control over connections to Chinese sites should
>it choose to do so.  In addition, many of those launching these attacks
>are quite open about it and are not hard to track, meet, and chat with.
>They are not exactly trying to hide.

Agreed. See previous comment.

>Indeed, some of the attacks came from Chinese government computers.

Again, the proof? Where was this publicly stated?

>  The
>Chinese have arrested cyber criminals and have a demonstrated
>surveillance capability for their Internet systems.  They could stop it
>if they chose to.  Indeed I think that they did.  Once attribution to
>the Chinese government started to be asserted, the attacks cooled
>rapidly.

um....this April 11th Wired article tied the attacks to the Chinese government:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42982-2,00.html

And while US hackers were actively defacing Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean 
sites from as far back as March, the heavy activity from China didn't start 
until around April 29th - May 1st and petered out around May 10th.

>I agree that the Us attackers have a relationship with the media that I
>do not like.  But I disagree about the notion that these are not related
>to government policy.

That last sentence confused me. You disagree with my notion that Chinese 
attacks on US servers are not government sanctioned? I would say it's 
almost definitely not government policy HOWEVER I don't think the Chinese 
government would lift a finger to stop the kids....but I wouldn't expect 
public encouragement either.

--
B.K. DeLong
bkdelong@pobox.com
617.877.3271

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-06-30 21:44:17 PDT