Free Republic

Young man's blog provides a rare glimpse of the secretive hacking establishment of the Chinese military, whose efforts have become a growing concern to the U.S. BEIJING — For a 25-year-old computer whiz enlisted in a People's Liberation Army hacking unit, life was all about low pay, drudgery and social isolation.Nothing at all like the unkempt hackers of popular imagination, the young man wore a military uniform at work in Shanghai. He lived in a dorm where meals often consisted of instant ramen noodles. The workday ran from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., although hackers were often required to work...

The U.S. is a victim of a massive and sustained campaign of cyber espionage, according to a classified intelligence assessment revealed by the Washington Post on Monday. These periodic assessments, officially called National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), are issued by the Director of National Intelligence to express the general consensus of the intelligence community and to inform policymakers. That the United States is the target of a large cyber espionage campaign seems like a foregone conclusion, given recent developments. In the last few weeks, there have been reports of complex cyber attacks against papers like the New York Times or The...

Bombardment without collateral damage - amazing Analysis The massive 300Gbit-a-second DDoS attack against anti-spam non-profit Spamhaus this week didn't actually break the internet's backbone, contrary to many early reports. The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault in history began on 18 March, and initially hit the Spamhaus website and CloudFlare, the networking biz hired by the spammer-tracking outfit to keep its systems online, at 90Gbps. After failing to knock the organisation offline, the attackers targeted CloudFlare's upstream ISPs as well as portions of the networks at internet traffic exchanges in London and Amsterdam. The volume of this second-wave attack, which began...

A U.S. intelligence report for the first time links China’s largest telecommunications company to Beijing’s KGB-like intelligence service and says the company recently received nearly a quarter-billion dollars from the Chinese government. The disclosures are a setback for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.’s efforts to break into the U.S. telecommunications market. The company has been blocked from doing so three times by the U.S. government because of concerns about its links to the Chinese government. The report by the CIA-based Open Source Center states that Huawei’s chairwoman, Sun Yafang, worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) Communications Department before joining...

What if a crippling attack struck the country's digital infrastructure? Experts including current and former officials tackle the question. The results show that the peril is real and growing. The crisis began when college basketball fans downloaded a free March Madness application to their smart phones. The app hid spyware that stole passwords, intercepted e-mails and created havoc. Soon 60 million cellphones were dead. The Internet crashed, finance and commerce collapsed, and most of the nation's electric grid went dark. White House aides discussed putting the Army in American cities. "We're in uncharted territory here," was the most common refrain...

Scene: The White House Situation Room. Event: A massive cyber attack has turned the cellphones and computers of tens of millions of Americans into weapons to shut down the Internet. A cascading series of events then knocks out power for most of the East Coast amid hurricanes and a heat wave. Is the assault on cellphones an armed attack? In a crisis, what power does the government have to order phone and Internet carriers to allow monitoring of their networks? What level of privacy can Americans expect? A war game, sponsored by a nonprofit group and attended by former top-ranking...

The United States is at risk of a crippling cyber attack that could "wreak havoc" on the country because the "technological balance" makes it much easier to launch a cyber strike than defend against it, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said Tuesday.

Blogger becomes casualty of Iran cyber-wars The Associated Press - ‎Apr 11, 2009‎ He was Iran's first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back with the tools they know ...