When Worldviews Collide
26-01-2010
Google's reaction to the discovery that its e-mail servers had recently been hacked by the Chinese government's cloak and dagger nerds has been a revelation. You may have been following the stand-off, and rightly so - it brings together many of the issues lots of us are concerned about, in a dramatic and quite unexpected way. FT.com ran a good article on it, pointing out that the worldview of engagement with China leading to liberalisation, especially when involving such large scale investment and technology transfer, is turning out to be a naïve hope.
But there's a lot more to this story than censorship in China - in fact that's only a small part of it, and the bigger picture is a lot more disturbing. The attacks on Google were part of another co-ordinated campaign of hacking that took cyberwarfare to a new level of sophistication, as this report in wired.com explains in alarming detail.
The attacks didn't just target Google's e-mail servers, but Adobe and up to 30 other large corporations for source code. The attack was traced back to its Beijing roots, as the NYT reported, through the correlation of some of its content, a version of the Hydraq Trojan targetting Windows, with that published in specific Chinese-only technical journals.
To distinguish them from other large scale attacks, like Titan Rain or GhostNet (the 103-country world hacking tour de force, which stole design and software secrets from the $300bn Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter, rendering it potentially vulnerable in the future to countermeasures), it has been dubbed Project Aurora, after the name of a file a hacker used to dump data into. Let's hope it wasn't an in-joke in Beijing amongst all the guys in the Chinese Air Force's 'Geek Squadron' thought to be responsible, and named after the 2007 US tests on national security, also called Aurora, which concluded that future sabotage of the electricity grid was indeed possible, with devastating effects, as CNN reported at the time.
You can follow up on the extent of their 'Air Force' operation in this report from Fox. Stealing secrets from stealth warplanes and silent submarine engines, while also planting time-delayed malware in electricity grids? Sounds more like the plot of a Cold War thriller to me, except for the fact that this is all too real.
Google's statements and threats to pull out of China have opened a rift in relations we haven't seen for a while. So who else is stepping up to the mark? Well, you might have thought Microsoft, whose fundamentally flawed Explorer browser was at the centre of most of the attacks, would have been supportive. But CEO Steven Ballmer just said:
“There are attacks every day. I don’t think there was anything unusual, so I don’t understand,” he said, “we’re attacked every day from all parts of the world and I think everybody else is too. We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
Bill Gates downplayed events, saying 'Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited,' while Motorola, also hacked in the same campaign, put out a release that even the WSJ decried as weak in the real context of what's been happening:
"Motorola is committed to offering the most innovative mobile products and experiences in China."
Sooner or later, these world views are going to have to collide. With the reality described above.
Category: China
