China Admits To Cyber Army

ejmaztec wrote: »

Who, Giggabyte?

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

With a bit of luck, hopefully this Chinese cyber army has only just hacked Windows 95.

ScumLord wrote: »

I don't think the Chinese give a flying **** what the rest of the world thinks at this stage, they know they have us by the short and curlys.

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Lanaier wrote: »

They "admit" it?

This is common knowledge here, hardly newsworthy.
Slow news day at The Times.

Senior US Government officials have had their passwords stolen and emails read by hackers based in the central Chinese city of Jinan, Google admitted yesterday.

The internet giant said the cyber-attack on its Gmail system, which has some 200 million users, targeted journalists and dissidents as well as government officials and worked by duping users into revealing their passwords with “phishing” scams.

Eric Grosse, a Google software security engineer, wrote on the company’s official blog that the purpose of the hacking operation seemed to be “to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords”.

It was not clear at what level the US Government had been penetrated, which came a day after the Pentagon threatened to respond to serious cyber-attacks with real-world military force. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” one US military official said.

A senior White House spokesman said the Google report was being investigated but that there was no reason to believe government email accounts had been compromised, indicating that hackers may have obtained only officials’ private Gmail passwords.

Eric Schmidt, the Google chairman, told the Wall Street Journal last night that the company was “massively more protected than we were a year ago”. Even so, Mr Grosse advised Gmail users to start accessing their messages with a two-step verification system that allows the system to match particular computers or hand-held devices to known users.

In January 2010 Google confirmed another “highly sophisticated” attack on its servers, leading the company to end a limited censorship agreement with the Chinese government that had been in place since 2006. That attack was traced to universities and military facilities in six Chinese regions, including a specialist vocational school in Jinan.

Chinese human rights advocates were the main target of that attack, the company said.

The results are startling. Working against NTLM login passwords, a password of “fjR8n” can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds, at a rate of 9.8 million password guesses per second. On the GPU, it takes less than a second at a rate of 3.3 billion passwords per second.

Increase the password to 6 characters (pYDbL6), and the CPU takes 1 hour 30 minutes versus only four seconds on the GPU. Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU.