Tag Archives: hacking

Blog

Hackers of the future – the Pentagon is hiring!

hackerWell, maybe John Robb was wrong about the Pentagon… because here they are, announcing a recruitment contest for young hackers with the intention of turning them into military cybersecurity professionals.

The competitions, as planned, go far beyond mere academics. The Air Force will run a so-called Cyber Patriot competition focused on network defense, fending off a “Red Team” of hackers attempting to steal data from the participants’ systems. The Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center will expand its Digital Forensics Challenge, a program it has run since 2006, to include high school and college participants, tasking them with problems like tracing digital intrusions and reconstructing incomplete data sources.

The security-focused SANS Institute, an independent organization, plans to organize what may be the most controversial of the three contests: the Network Attack Competition, which challenges students to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software, compromise enemy systems and steal data.

All that stuff that the Chinese aren’t supposed to be able to do to US systems, in other words. The brass are worried that China’s got the jump on them as far as young hacker talent is concerned:

China, for its part, may be well ahead of the U.S. in cybersecurity education and recruiting, Paller argues. In a hearing before the Senate’s Homeland Security last month, Paller told the story of Tan Dailin, a graduate student in China’s Sichuan province who in 2005 won several government-sponsored hacking competitions and the next year was caught intruding on U.S. Department of Defense networks, siphoning thousands of unclassified documents to servers in China. “China’s People’s Liberation Army is running these competitions all the time, aiming their recruits at the U.S.,” Paller says. “Shouldn’t we be looking for our best talent the way other countries are?”

But a parallel track of domestic cyber training raises the specter of U.S. government-trained hackers not only stealing data from foreign enemies–a diplomatically thorny prospect in itself–but also hacking other targets for fun or profit, and potentially becoming a rogue collection of skilled cybercriminals. “There probably could be a couple people we train that go to the dark side,” admits Jim Christy, director of the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center. “But we’ll catch them and send a message. The good guys will outweigh the bad.”

You’ll catch the ones who aren’t so good at covering their tracks, perhaps. Still, I wonder if the same motivations will express. As mentioned before, China’s hackers are allegedly self-trained and motivated by their own patriotism; will the same apply to the geek demographic in the US, or will the young console cowboys see more opportunity (or less risk) in the civilian sphere? [via SlashDot; image by ioerror]

Blog

The Red Dragon has no head – China’s citizen hackers

4 Comments

Chinese flagsThere’s been plenty of press recently about the threat of Chinese hackers undermining infrastructure in the West, and about the GhostNet network, which may or may not be a covert espionage tool of China’s government.

The trouble is that the line between state-sponsored or military hackers and young patriots with time and talent isn’t clear; it may be that the bulk of the “red hackers” aren’t employed by their government, and are just hobbyists with a convenient target. Some folk do it “for the lulz”; these people are allegedly doing it for their nation. [image by parrhesiastes]

From China, where I’ve lived for four years, this assessment looks spot-on. Hackers are pervasive, their imprint inescapable. There are hacker magazines, hacker clubs and hacker online serials. A 2005 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences survey equates hackers and rock stars, with nearly 43 percent of elementary-school students saying they “adore” China’s hackers. One third say they want to be one. This culture thrives on a viral, Internet-driven nationalism. The post-Tiananmen generation has known little hardship, so rather than pushing for democracy, many young people define themselves in opposition to the West. China’s Internet patriots, who call themselves “red hackers,” may not be acting on direct behalf of their government, but the effect is much the same.

Is this, perhaps, the new emergent youth politics? Going out and fighting for what you believe in out in the digital trenches – even if the thing you’re fighting for isn’t quite what you think it is. And hey – if you get powerful enough, maybe it’ll start changing to be more like what you want to keep you sweet, as it becomes increasingly dependent on your leverage beyond the border. Talk about grass-roots change, right? [via Bruce Sterling]

What’s interesting to me is that patriotism can motivate these kids to hacking. Here in the UK, the most that nationalist sentiment can seem to stir up in young folk is the desire to thump brown people, and those easily swayed by such desires aren’t often in the possession of a mentality that would lend itself to 00b3r-1337 computer skillzorz; as a general rule, Western hackers tend to work against governments and authority (how much is that due to the influence of cyberpunk literature?), so it’s a cognitive dissonance moment for me to read about kids voluntarily furthering the cause of their nation rather than their own interests.

Which is one of the things that makes me wonder just how true all of these stories are. As a general trend, the last twelve months have seen a big increase in news stories that give us reason to fear an amorphous and distant conceptual bundle labelled “China”, in inverse proportion to coverage of the previous faceless multiplex global enemy, namely Muslim extremism. The economic crisis has made this particularly easy (China is buying up western debt! China is stockpiling commodities!), and climate change is a nice lever too (China won’t stop polluting, so why should we?).

While I understand the need for political rhetoric (and the media that feed from it, remora-like) to set up ideological opponents against which to rally the diminishing regiments of Western patriots, I sincerely hope we’re not headed for some sort of Cold War re-run. We’ve enough problems on our plate as it is.

Blog

DIY industrial-grade book scanner made from junk

2 Comments

Have you ever fancied playing Google for the afternoon? How about starting your own book-scanning project?

If you’re thinking that’s too far out of your price-range, think again – as an entry to a contest on Instructables, a chap called Daniel Reetz built his own automated book scanner, predominantly using stuff he found in dumpsters alongside some cheap digital cameras.

Reetz's Model 2 book-scanner

OK, so even if you could get the parts, the techniques might be a bit beyond the reach of those of us who struggle to change a bicycle tyre… but that’s a pretty impressive display of resourcefulness and ingenuity on Reetz’s part. I wonder if he’ll let me borrow it in exchange for scanned copies of every book I own? [via Hack-A-Day]

Blog

O NOES! Infrastructure hakz0rz!

1 Comment

network switchesSo, the big red-hot knee-jerk story of the week is surely the suggestion that there’s a possibility that maybe some foreign countries are thinking about whether it would be worth hacking the poorly-secured United States power grid infrastructure with computer intrusion techniques. Maybe.

… multiple countries are believed to be behind the attacks, including both the Russians and the Chinese. Some of these were apparently detected and stopped before any damage could be done, while the remains of others (and tools designed to trigger failures) have been found in other areas. The article doesn’t give specific information on where issues were and weren’t detected, or which infrastructures were contaminated, but the list of “at-risk” institutions include electric plants (particularly nuclear ones), financial networks, and water management/treatment facilities.

Credit where it’s due, Ars Technica isn’t going to flap its arms and panic like some other news sources:

The Internet is merely the latest—and by most measures, the most benign—means by which one country could attack another. Personally, given the choice between ICBMs, chemical weapons, “the bomb”, or V-2 rockets, I’ll take the Internet.

Amen. Bruce Schneier agrees:

Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers.

Right. And why worry about complex hacks when a crew with some industrial tools can wipe out the data grid for a whole region?

Ten fiber-optic cables carrying were cut at four locations in the predawn darkness. Residential and business customers quickly found that telephone service was perhaps more laced into their everyday needs than they thought. Suddenly they couldn’t draw out money, send text messages, check e-mail or Web sites, call anyone for help, or even check on friends or relatives down the road.

Several people had to be driven to hospitals because they were unable to summon ambulances. Many businesses lapsed into idleness for hours, without the ability to contact associates or customers.

The dogs in your own backyard are more likely to bite you than your neighbour’s. [image by jonbell]

Blog

Hacker havens are ad-hocracies

3 Comments

hacker's workbenchWhen the going gets tough, the geeks gang together; Wired reports on the spreading global phenomenon of ‘hacker spaces’ – community owned and operated workshops full of tools and parts that provide a home away from home for the technically-minded.

At the center of this community are hacker spaces like Noisebridge, where like-minded geeks gather to work on personal projects, learn from each other and hang out in a nerd-friendly atmosphere. Like artist collectives in the ’60s and ’70s, hacker spaces are springing up all over.

Interesting throw-away comparison – is the increasing ubiquity of technology making it into a branch of the plastic arts? Or did that happen a long time ago, with no one in the arts being willing to admit it?

There are now 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United States, according to Hackerspaces.org. Another 27 U.S. spaces are in the planning or building stage.

Located in rented studios, lofts or semi-commercial spaces, hacker spaces tend to be loosely organized, governed by consensus, and infused with an almost utopian spirit of cooperation and sharing.

Uh-oh, the U-word…nothing good ever comes of utopias, does it? Still, one man’s utopia is another man’s logically structured system of governance:

Many are governed by consensus. Noisebridge and Vienna’s Metalab have boards, but they are structured to keep board members accountable to the desires of the members. NYC Resistor is similarly democratic. Most of the space — and the tools — are shared by all members, with small spaces set aside for each member to store items and projects for their own use.

“The way hacker spaces are organized seems to be a reaction against American individualism — the idea that we all need to be in our separate single-family homes with a garage,” says White. “Choosing to organize collectives where you’re sharing a space and sharing tools with people who are not your family and not your co-workers — that feels different to me.”

Things may differ in continental Europe, but it sounds pretty different to this British citizen, too; it’s not just the US that developed a knee-jerk reaction to anything that smacks even slightly of communism. That said, I’d be overjoyed if someone set one of these places up in my town – if nothing else, it would be nice to geek out in company for a change. [image by Justin Marty]

We’ll leave the final few comments to Chairman Bruce Sterling:

These enterprises really have the look-and-smell of a post-Meltdown Transition Web.

Indeed; Bicycle Repair Men for the noughties, you might say.

Let’s hope the inhabitants stay clear on the concept, and don’t start whacking each other in a mafia-style street struggle for tech turf.

And you people email in saying I’m negative…