There is an odd private-public partnership at work in China. I trace it back to May 1, 2001, when Chinese hackers attacked US web sites in protest over the US spy-plane incident, although you can argue that Chinese hacking pre-dates that by years.
Jim Melnick, Director of Global Threat Intelligence at iSightPartners gave me some of his insights into how it works yesterday at the ISSA security conference in Boise. He helped me to understand that there is a large group of nationalist hackers that take it upon themselves to attack targets based on their criticism of China or relationship to organizations, such as CNN , that they feel are in some way anti-Chinese. These groups operate with the tacit approval of the Chinese government until they get out of control at which point they are reigned in. This fits with the extensive coverage in the Wall Street Journal today. (I won’t link to it because you have to spoof a referral from Google news.)
Now a Web 2.0 site, SlideShare.com is under attack. According to TechCrunch they have been targeted by Chinese hacktivists who are trying to social engineer access credentials and as that is not working are launching DDoS attacks, the third one underway today.
I believe it is time for the international community to step in. This could happen on several levels. Diplomatically, countries with Chinese connections should exert pressure on the Chinese government to crack down on these criminal activities. Application service providers like SlideShare should block access all together from Chinese net addresses. Major ISP’s should invest in filtering technology and start to monitor and block abusive traffic from China.
China has become the country with the largest population of net users in the world. It’s citizens should demonstrate that they are good ‘Netizens, capable of participating in the free forum of the Internet, or they will find themselves limited in their use of this great world resource.
