China Shuts Down Malware/Hacker Academy

[Street Skater]

Chinese police shut down hacker training business

"BEIJING (AP) -- Police in central China have shut down a hacker training operation that openly recruited thousands of members online and provided them with cyberattack lessons and malicious software, state media said Monday.

The crackdown comes amid growing concern that China is a center for a global explosion of Internet crimes. Search giant Google said last month its e-mail accounts were hacked from China in an assault that also hit at least 20 other companies."

[A training academy for Malware authors] doesn't exactly have a ring of completeness or truth about it. How exactly do they make business out of Malware? Identity Theft and Data Mining perhaps but negotiating those scams and bringing the ill-gotten funds back into China seems a bit of a hurdle. My impression has been that Chinese Malware is more malicious and disruptive than it is designed as some money making criminal enterprise--but I definitely need to have have a closer look at the data mining potential of Chinese Malware I've come up against over the last 2 years.

I've suspected for a long time that there are 2 sides to the huge number of ingenious Malware infections I've seen from China:

1. ON one hand I think it is a protest against restrictive internet access policy China has taken from the beginning (and seems to be showing no signs of easing up on--witness the ongoing issues with Google). I confess it's never been entirely clear to me how hurling out Malware at the rest of the world is an effective protest--,other than it's nonconformist. Also the innovative nature of much of the Malware (and it markedly more so every 3 months or so) does indicate that these programmers could work around any attempts China puts in place to hobble/restrict access to the WWW.**
2. ON the other hand I have also gotten the distinct impression the ingenious and malicious wide array of infections emanating from China is also intended to serve notice to the "west" that Chinese users understand the technology fully well enough to fuck our systems up.

** On my international Gay forum which is dual purpose (gay porn torrents source & 200,000 member forum) we have a number guys from within mainline china who circumvent chinese internet regulations just to access our site in the first place. We similarly have gay Iranian posters and posters from other parts of the world who work around their governments attempt to block access. Our Iranian posters have to be just as inventive as their Chinese counterparts to circumvent government repression but I haven't seen any significant Malware at all from Iran so far.

[adamhenry]

HAhahaha, rolz at the Chinese government.

[El Duderino]

you can't stop the internet baby

[Street Skater]

Certainly virtual private networks (VPN) seem to be capable of tunneling through rudimentary internet blocking done currently by countries like China, Iran and Australia.

More effective blocking technology could certainly be employed and would up the ante considerably. Also if blocking became more global (with governments in the EU and USA participating in their own internet "filtering"--possibly under the guise of "protecting the infrastructure") it could greatly change the currently landscape of the WWW as it exists now.

I'm still curious as to why there has been so much Malware coming out of China for the last few years.

[adamhenry]

Originally Posted by Street Skater

I'm still curious as to why there has been so much Malware coming out of China for the last few years.

It's done by the Chinese government for a number if reasons, including military espionage, corporate spying and R&D theft. Of course there is the usual reverse engineering of high tech products and sabotage.

[Street Skater]

Originally Posted by adamhenry

It's done by the Chinese government for a number if reasons, including military espionage, corporate spying and R&D theft. Of course there is the usual reverse engineering of high tech products and sabotage.

I have a feeling the Chinese government wouldn't be primarily targeting Personal Computers running MS Windows if their goals were quite that lofty.

[adamhenry]

You're familiar with a DDoS attack?

[Street Skater]

Originally Posted by adamhenry

You're familiar with a DDoS attack?

Of course and that seems more like the net effect of Chinese Malware as I've experienced it so far and I haven't seen much evidence that Chinese authored malware has succeeded in catastrophic outages of major systems. For the most part they seem to target and hit at a much smaller scale. Mostly individual users on windows based personal computers.

So far I haven't yet had the experience of a Linux/UNIX server being brought down by Chinese Malware let alone major Enterprise systems such as we used at NASA, Wall Street, DPS TX, or even Pepsico Intl. I haven't even had a MS Server brought down though I'm sure they are relatively vulnerable.

It's one thing to bring systems to their knees via thousands or millions of infected PC clients running consumer Windows (XP Win7)--quite another to penetrate enterprise level systems to accomplish "Military espionage, corporate spying, R&D theft & reverse engineering of high tech products."

[Rivalrys]

Good for your friends in these countries...

they are the real heroes....

not letting a government keep them from seeing guys suck other guys cocks

[Skeeter]

Originally Posted by Rivalrys

Good for your friends in these countries...

they are the real heroes....

not letting a government keep them from seeing guys suck other guys cocks

heh

[Street Skater]

Originally Posted by Rivalrys

Good for your friends in these countries...
they are the real heroes....
not letting a government keep them from seeing guys suck other guys cocks

Tks. Every effort is make to appeal to all cultures and it's nice to have those efforts appreciated.

[canuckster]

I Dunno about this chinese hacker bullshit, lets see some hard proof first.
Honestly do you think it would be hard for the government to now convince everyone and say "SEE, look we DO need control over the internet to protect you from all the bad guys who are chinese. lets lock this shit down.

now lets seriously think about the implications of people hacking computers . If people really had information to protect, they could introduce unique systems and architecture that no one else knows about and have these machines that simply don't talk to the commonplace pc's of the masses, or that are networked on a completely different wavelength that no one knows about. problem solved.......

worst case scenario, the internet goes down for a while.....whoopdy fucking do, we did without it before we will again.

[Montrealmlr]

Malware makes money. It usually gets the infected user or people on his contact list to click links, or at least that's what they're attempting. Otherwise it wouldn't exist to the degree that it does today.