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The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

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Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#41

Post by tehjoker »

natechols wrote: post #35
tehjoker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist to encourage sharing of information in the context of a private marketplace. Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results. If anything, competition would be better if there were no patents. If employers could simply poach key employees by offering good salaries, they would get that information quite easily.

> Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results. This is another gross oversimplification at best, and I have yet to hear anyone who has spent significant amounts of time in either public or private sector R&D make such a claim. Real life, and product development in particular, is not so easily reduced to catchy political slogans.

Point to nearly anything that has dramatically changed modern life and you will see the arm of the state involved: GPS, internet, the airplane, etc. The best argument I'm aware of for private enterprise producing really novel products is Bell Research, however they were a regulated monopoly, not a competitive industry and the state authorized 10% additional charges for investment.

You can make some arguments about things like iPhones but that device depended on a huge state funded or regulated infrastructure to be useful (e.g. cell towers, internet), and it was essentially a very polished cobbling together of different components (microchips, batteries) that were developed from many decades of state supported / regulated monopoly research.

Business is very good at taking something off the shelf and making money with it. It's very bad at sustained investment that might not be profitable more than a few years away.

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#42

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

oefrha wrote: post #34
toshk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I remember once I was watching the news and they claimed a hack was done by Russians because they found Russian comments in the code. That didn't sound very convincing :). The ledger evidence sounds better. At the same time in this case I would be more surprised if the PRC , since their need for control, and since the stakes are extremely high, wasn't doing such things.

Similarly, I recall a strain of malware being attributed to Chinese hackers because variable names were in Chinese; then when you actually inspect the code, it's clearly Unicode gibberish generated by an obfuscator... That is to say, the hackers weren't even trying to be misleading, it was just a result of obfuscation reminiscent of mojibake. (I read the article on Ars Technica but don't remember enough details to fi…

Do spanish instead... represent!

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#43

Post by troughway »

There is a big business opportunity, which I am sure is already fulfilled to some extent, to provide air-gap and other securities/countermeasures to businesses and orgs that deal with highly sensitive data, equipment, specimens, whatever.

Something akin to an anti-Palantir.

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#44

Post by kolbe »

pcbro141 wrote: post #7

Shouldn't all countries be working together openly on fighting the pandemic? Given that it's hurting the whole world.

Sure, but what does this have to do with a single state actor that hides everything they do (with fatal consequences in 2020) hacking another?

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#46

Post by kube-system »

bt1a wrote: post #2

I've always wondered how you can be so sure it's PRC in the age of easily being able to mask your true IP address. Perhaps the identified attacks have been previously linked with the PRC, or another option is that the actors were not as covert as they thought. Like remember the indictment of 12 russians ( https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download ) The FBI linked a pool of bitcoins used to purchase a VPN service…

An IP address is merely one of thousands of ways that you could identify the source of network traffic.

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#47

Post by natechols »

tehjoker wrote: post #41
natechols wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results. This is another gross oversimplification at best, and I have yet to hear anyone who has spent significant amounts of time in either public or private sector R&D make such a claim. Real life, and product development in particular, is not so easily reduced to catchy political slogans.

Point to nearly anything that has dramatically changed modern life and you will see the arm of the state involved: GPS, internet, the airplane, etc. The best argument I'm aware of for private enterprise producing really novel products is Bell Research, however they were a regulated monopoly, not a competitive industry and the state authorized 10% additional charges for investment. You can make some arguments about th…

If you think Apple simply "took something off the shelf" and sold us iPhones at huge markups, you clearly know even less about R&D than I assumed. Cherry-picking examples like the Internet doesn't really prove your point: try comparing the amount of taxpayer-funded R&D that went into the early (pre-1994) Internet with the amount of private investment since then. (I have no idea what the actual numbers are but I'd guess at least two orders of magnitude difference based on what I've seen elsewhere.)

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#48

Post by coliveira »

natechols wrote: post #38
coliveira wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misunderstanding the matter of patents. Modern patents exist precisely because of the inevitability of industrial espionage, which is largely practiced by all developed countries. The goal is that, even after a trade secret is stolen, it will be made useless because nobody can use that information. So the goal is not to "share knowledge", but to avoid the practical use of knowledge that was shared by any mean…

In the USA, patents are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and the purpose is to incentivize disclosure, not because the founders were worried about industrial espionage. It would have been awfully difficult for hostile powers to remotely hack our R&D facilities in 1789.

Think again. Hacking is a very old activity; it was not done with computers in 1789, but you can be sure that there was a lot of industrial espionage between Britain and the US at that time.

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#49

Post by blhack »

jeffbee wrote: post #23
pcbro141 wrote: post #7

Shouldn't all countries be working together openly on fighting the pandemic? Given that it's hurting the whole world.

It's not hurting the whole world equally. It's been far worse for countries peopled with and led by idiots, like the USA. As long as this goes on it benefits China very greatly. We've already seen a huge shift away from the idea of American global leadership.

What an unbelievably low effort comment.

>It's been far worse for countries peopled with and led by idiots, like the USA.

Ranked next to Western European countries, the US ranks at the bottom of worst effected. The worst effected country is Belgium, followed by France, Italy, the UK, Sweden, and so on. As far as CFR, the US is about 1/3 or Belgium, and about 1/2 of the Netherlands.

Among western liberal democracies, the US is among the safest/best place to be right now with regards to health outcomes related to the coronavirus.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

>We've already seen a huge shift away from the idea of American global leadership.

This is simply not true, and the evidence of it not being true is echoed at every reasonable metric. People are increasingly storing their money in the US (as evidenced by the stock market refusing to collapse), and increasingly following along with US-led pullbacks against global organizations like the WHO.

China is rapidly losing its ability to enact soft power anywhere in the world.

We are also only gaining in economic power: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-0...

--

The US coronavirus response has been one of the strongest among western nations, our economy has weathered this better than anywhere in the world, and we will likely come out of this crisis even stronger, with even more global power, than we went in.

Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

#50

Post by RobertoG »

orbifold wrote: post #37

Just for additional context several super computing sites in Europe were attacked a few weeks ago and are still down, among them PizDaint at CSCS, which ranks 6th in the world, several super computing sites in Germany (FZ Juelich) and so on. I think no-one wishes this to turn into a kinetic war, but for all we know besides the economic warfare that has been going on for quite some time, this feels like we are in an a…

we are in all out conflict with China because some super computing sites were "attacked"?

That's not a very responsible statement.

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