Saturday, November 10, 2012

Regarding Chinese Computer Hacking

Some Americans who have access to sensitive information and who travel to China describe going to tremendous lengths to minimize government efforts to seize their data. Some copy and paste their passwords from USB thumb drives rather than type them out, for fear of key-logging software. They carry “loaner” laptops and cellphones and pull out cellphone batteries during sensitive meetings, worried that the microphone could be switched on remotely. The New York Times called such extreme measures, which also apply in other countries, “standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies.”
Even still, the publicly reported incidents of successful Chinese hacking – such as a March intrusion that stole a $1 billion, 10-year research project overnight – suggest that the efforts might be near-continuous and the successes rampant. A 2010 Chinese infiltration of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ended up funneling weeks of corporate data; even after the chamber thought it had reestablished security, it discovered that an office printer and a corporate apartment thermostat were still sending data – who knows what kind? – back to China. You have to wonder what a similar infiltration into the private e-mail account of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency might have turned up.
Of course, the CIA director is not the Chamber of Commerce, which may explain why the FBI’s counter-intelligence monitoring is so sensitive that just Broadwell’s access to his Gmail account triggered an investigation. But the fact that the FBI looked so hard and so carefully – and that Petraeus lost his directorship of the CIA over an intrusion that many of us might consider minor or even routine – underscores the potential risk to U.S. intelligence entailed in Petraeus’s, or Broadwell’s, alleged misuse of his personal account.

end quote from:

Why David Petraeus's Gmail account is a national security issue

What is interesting to me is the level of sophistication needed now in regard to China for not only governmental officials but also of businessmen of all kinds in China while visiting there from the U.S. Because if all of them are not incredibly vigilant all useful trade secrets including business practices, inventions and company policies could be lost or stolen in a variety of ways.

To me, this is less about military confrontations with the U.S. and more about China, the Corporation. Because when I actually seriously look at how China operates it does not operate like a country, it operates more like a Corporation which likely is a harbinger regarding the future of mankind in some ways because of how much of the population on earth lives under this, (up to now) very efficient Corporation. However, socially what they are doing is not working at all for the average Chinese person because of corruption within the hierarchy of the  the executives of China the Corporation. 

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