Yeah, but our kids can still all use TikTok, right? That's the important thing here.
The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
121–130 of 262 posts
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#122Why would they be press-releasing this other than to drive public opinion against China?
While the admin is currently pushing a very negative image against China, I do not believe the FBI would do that so lightly.
> I do not believe the FBI would do that so lightly
What do you mean by "so lightly"? It changed the entire meaning of the sentence.
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#123Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#124This is information that can save lives, so I support any nation to hack on COVID research, anywhere in the world. If they patent COVID research, I also support breaking any patent.
Compromising remote systems puts researchers, their work, and patient rights at risk. Patents are published publicly and available free of charge, so I'm not sure how that would be a reasonable justification for compromising other's computers. "Research" per se isn't patentable anyway.
Patents provide country-by-country protection -- a US Patent doesn't mean anything in other countries - except for being evidence of prior art in their own patent offices.
Also, some/many countries have laws that disallow patents or patent infringement claims associated with medicine.
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#125I appreciate that there’s probably a lot I don’t know or understand about the national security aspects of this but it seems wrong to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. Protecting security interests is one thing but this press release specifically mentions protecting intellectual property and that seems kind of tone deaf. I al…
> to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. this presumes that the stolen information would be used 'to help as many people as possible'.. Also, 1st country with viable vaccine/treatment/etc will have a huge geopolitical bargaining chip & it will likely be used as such no matter the country of origin.
to be clear, wasn't disagreeing, but pointing out some potential rationale why this could conceivably be viewed as a security matter vs open science matter
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the west's covert activities are not limited to benign surveillance. Compared to the CCP, it's fairly benign. The example you gave, Merkel's phone, is a textbook example. Spy all you want, but we're not stealing IP or sabotaging power grids (to my knowledge). We're not interfering with other countries' covid response or possibly corrupting medical records. > why would the Chinese be interested in sabotage here? Pre…
The power grid I don't know, but gaz pipeline apparently they did. See for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Abyss
I mean, come on:
> A report in the Moscow Times quoted KGB veteran Vasily Pchelintsev as saying that there was a natural gas pipeline explosion in 1982, but it was near Tobolsk on a pipeline connecting the Urengoy gas field to the city of Chelyabinsk, and it was caused by poor construction rather than sabotage; according to Pchelintsev's account, no one was killed in the explosion and the damage was repaired within one day.[2] Reed's account has also not been corroborated by intelligence agencies in the United States.[3]
From that page.
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#127Given today's anti-free-thinker HN climate I'm probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for saying this, but I feel I need to say it. I don't think COVID-19 research should be secretive, I think it should be a global effort, and I'm perfectly happy with the idea of any nation having open access to all COVID-19 research, vaccines, results, and (anonymized) data. There should NOT be a concept of intellectual propert…
Before sanctioning stealing, perhaps the problem is two fold. China wants to have the first vaccine for: * Becoming the first to market, to try and salvage their reputation * Using the vaccine as leverage toward the incoming sanctions for violating the Hong Kong treaty during UK handover, as well as the now-declared possible non-peaceful reunification of Taiwan * monetary gain * leverage against the US restricting/re…
> * to try and salvage their reputation
Really? They just recently ban Australia trades because Australia inquire about Covid19 origins.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/australia-chin...
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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
Incredibly optimistic and I don't see the evidence for it. The US economy isn't out of the storm yet. Bear Sterns fell in March 2008 and the US economy kept "whistling past the graveyard" until September before it fell off a cliff after the smoke had somewhat cleared. Let's check back in 3-5 months. The only national institution in the US that didn't take a perception hit so far is the Federal Reserve, but that's because it threw $8+ trillion at the problem and made big promises early (too soon to tell if that massive injection will be problematic).
I see a national USA government who chose not to take a significant role in either helping the states (and never told the states that this would be the policy) or other nations (as we normally do during every natural disaster and health epidemic since WW2). I don't think I am alone in that view.
S Korea and Italy (yes, that Italy) sent PPE to assist other countries early in the first wave while the US federal government was intercepting shipments which were legally purchased by (entities in) other countries and diverting them to a federal government stockpile (not the states where civilians needed them).
It's worth looking at how well S Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore reacted to the outbreak. Their emergency health systems acted as if it didn't matter if "China lied" or not and set up useful policies and procedures just in case the disease made it there.
China has started to donate the medical equipment (PPE, ventilators) they didn't need to use after the first wave and they are sending medical staff around the world to assist other countries. The US is exporting some hastily-made ventilators, but it's not yet clear if that will make a difference in the perceptions other nations have of our response.
I think the US has lost significant soft power as we failed to provide the worldwide leadership we have since we became a superpower and China stood up to fill in the vacuum for very low cost to them.
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#129Just 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…
I'm not under the impression that non-military research and academic computing facilities are particularly well secured. Decades ago I spent a bunch of time around fnal.gov with a buddy who worked there, and they were debating the requirement of every computer, including desktops, having a static, public IPv4 address. Nobody wanted to be behind a firewall in the name of open, collaborative research.
Yes, the fundamental problem is that this sort of thing has around the top of the threat list for academic computing facilities for 30 years or so (originally typically coming in to the UK from CERN). It's just that this is larger scale, possibly more automated (filching SSH keys), and has a higher profile. Despite that, the systems are normally not managed to counter the threat, running with known privilege escalations either through unpatched OS vulnerabilities or through something like the batch system. Don't trust them with anything sensitive, including credentials like typed passwords or SSH forwarding, yet people do. I have an existence proof that it doesn't have to be like that for HPC systems, even if you're not allowed system time -- in which case live patching of login node kernels is specifically necessary.
Incidentally, if attackers were looking for sensitive research results from this, I think it would have to be targeted with detailed knowledge about what specific researchers were doing; after all, it's difficult enough for a typical researcher to keep track of their own stuff, and it mostly won't have look-at-me names.
Re: The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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.
The problem is that the numbers you cite aren't about response, they are about {affected population, environment, response}. Being lucky that the USA isn't as population-dense as Belgium (which is 10x the number of people per area of the USA) isn't a strategy, it's an environmental factor.