Google may pull out of China over cyber attacks

veritas_libertas

The title is a little flamboyant, but who knows...

Google may pull out of China over cyber attacks

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Comments

dynamik

That sounds like a good plan for China in general. It seems like they're struggling with overpopulation.

chrisone

We seriously need to counter hack these guys, every other weekend i hear of China attempting to hack the US and our interests.

tiersten

Mmm... Google pulling out of a huge lucrative market? I don't see that happening. They're already getting some flak from the mobile phone Android manufacturer world because of the Nexus One.

This has the feel of a tactic to get some publicity from the rest of the world so they have more bargaining power.

tiersten

chrisone wrote: »

We seriously need to counter hack these guys, every other weekend i hear of China attempting to hack the US and our interests.

Sure but only if you disconnect the US from the rest of the world as well. The spam statistics nearly always have the US as the top spamming country. I don't want that spam. Thanks.

dynamik

chrisone wrote: »

We seriously need to counter hack these guys, every other weekend i hear of China attempting to hack the US and our interests.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese hear plenty about us trying to hack them. I don't think that's a one-way street. Even if the governments aren't backing it, there are plenty of citizens in both camps trying to attack the other.

Ahriakin

China is the single biggest nationally identified source for online attacks but with one of the lowest success levels. They're in the headlines so much, and on IP blacklists, because the vast majority are nothing more than flies on a windshield and easily identified. The real ones to watch are those that are rarely seen but with high success ratios, not only does it mean they are a lot better at it but the lack of numbers can be very likely due to the fact that so many more are not getting caught - Russia anyone?

veritas_libertas

Ahriakin wrote: »

China is the single biggest nationally identified source for online attacks but with one of the lowest success levels. They're in the headlines so much, and on IP blacklists, because the vast majority are nothing more than flies on a windshield and easily identified. The real ones to watch are those that are rarely seen but with high success ratios, not only does it mean they are a lot better at it but the lack of numbers can be very likely due to the fact that so many more are not getting caught - Russia anyone?

Yeah, my firewall constantly labels incoming packets from China.

veritas_libertas

tiersten wrote: »

Sure but only if you disconnect the US from the rest of the world as well. The spam statistics nearly always have the US as the top spamming country. I don't want that spam. Thanks.

True, I can't help but wonder how many of these are Spam bots are created by individuals overseas. I read an article not long about how they target PCs in the US because we have faster pipes than the most areas in the world.

Hyper-Me

veritas_libertas wrote: »

True, I can't help but wonder how many of these are Spam bots are created by individuals overseas. I read an article not long about how they target PCs in the US because we have faster pipes than the most areas in the world.

I'd say you are likely right.

Ive contacted companies who's servers have spammed me before and almost always its a bot thats gotten onto their mail server and is sending out junk. I've even gotten a few thank yous from a few email admins for bringing it to their attention.

tiersten

veritas_libertas wrote: »

True, I can't help but wonder how many of these are Spam bots are created by individuals overseas. I read an article not long about how they target PCs in the US because we have faster pipes than the most areas in the world.

The actual spam botnets probably have a high proportion that are controlled by an organisation outside of the US but a large amount of the spam is generated in the US and outsourced out. Quite a few of the "spam kings" have been in the US.

As for the faster pipe reason, I doubt that is true. There are quite a few countries now e.g. Korea, Hong Kong, Sweden etc... where broadband is in the 2 digit megabit range at a minimum and has been for years. There is an advantage to having a concentrated population in major metropolitan areas when you're building network infrastructure.

tiersten

veritas_libertas wrote: »

Yeah, my firewall constantly labels incoming packets from China.

At one point I logged all the random scans and probes coming in from the internet, I gave up due to the sheer amount of traffic. Most major countries were well represented in the logs. At the time, the highest amount of traffic came from parts of Russia, Brazil and Turkey. I have no idea what the percentages are now.

L0gicB0mb508

APNIC IPs are behind most of the attempts I see. They usually suck at what they do and get stopped pretty easily.

dynamik

veritas_libertas wrote: »

True, I can't help but wonder how many of these are Spam bots are created by individuals overseas. I read an article not long about how they target PCs in the US because we have faster pipes than the most areas in the world.

What? Our bandwidth is garbage compared to the rest of the world (Sorry it's so big*):

*That's the first time I've had to say that in my life

L0gicB0mb508

Looks like I need to be rooting boxes anywhere else basically.

veritas_libertas

dynamik wrote: »

What? Our bandwidth is garbage compared to the rest of the world (Sorry it's so big*):

No your not

I did say than most, and Korea, Netherlands, and Japan are hardly most of the world. I have heard insane stories about how fast Japanese Internet is.

I can't help but wonder if this may have do with the lax security used by most Americans, and maybe the popularity of Linux in the rest of the world? That is me guessing there...

tiersten

veritas_libertas wrote: »

I did say than most, and Korea, Netherlands, and Japan are hardly most of the world. I have heard insane stories about how fast Japanese Internet is.

So excluding Japan, Korea, Finland, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Poland, Norway, Austria, Belgum, Iceland and Germany? Denmark and Italy seem to be roughly equivalent to the US as well.

veritas_libertas wrote: »

I can't help but wonder if this may have do with the lax security used by most Americans, and maybe the popularity of Linux in the rest of the world? That is me guessing there...

If most of the scam/spam changed overnight to something that wasn't English then I'd expect the number of new bots to drop. English speaking + lots of people online = the US.

10 Worst Spam Origin Countries

United States 2284
China 552
Russian Federation 435
United Kingdom 277
Spain 249
Argentina 236
Italy 187
Brazil 185
France 183
Germany 179

My theory doesn't explain why Canada doesn't appear in the list though *shrug*

veritas_libertas

tiersten wrote: »

My theory doesn't explain why Canada doesn't appear in the list though *shrug*

I give you points for trying

GAngel

tiersten wrote: »

So excluding Japan, Korea, Finland, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Poland, Norway, Austria, Belgum, Iceland and Germany? Denmark and Italy seem to be roughly equivalent to the US as well.

If most of the scam/spam changed overnight to something that wasn't English then I'd expect the number of new bots to drop. English speaking + lots of people online = the US.

10 Worst Spam Origin Countries

United States 2284
China 552
Russian Federation 435
United Kingdom 277
Spain 249
Argentina 236
Italy 187
Brazil 185
France 183
Germany 179

My theory doesn't explain why Canada doesn't appear in the list though *shrug*

Even foreign botnet owners loathe our dictator bandwidth capping ISP's that's why.

tiersten

GAngel wrote: »

Even foreign botnet owners loathe our dictator bandwidth capping ISP's that's why.

Harsh! The inline bandwidth warning popup from Rogers is a tad annoying though.

Countries with less stringent software piracy laws or lower average salary also tend to have higher numbers of bots. The users won't apply updates because they're worried they'll get locked out as they're running pirated software.

veritas_libertas

tiersten wrote: »

The inline bandwidth warning popup from Rogers is a tad annoying though.

I want to see a screen-shot of this. Sounds like something that would really drive me crazy! Does it look like NetZero/Juno use to for free Internet?

tiersten

veritas_libertas wrote: »

I want to see a screen-shot of this. Sounds like something that would really drive me crazy! Does it look like NetZero/Juno use to for free Internet?

No idea what the NetZero/Juno one is.

The Rogers one is that it would actually alter the HTML of other sites to insert the warning banner. They must be running some sort of transparent proxy to do this. You can see what it looks like here. They apparently also do something similar to SiteFinder if you use their DNS. I know its not due to any configuration or software installed on the local PC because I got the banners when using my own laptop at a friend's house.

veritas_libertas

Yuck...

GAngel

veritas_libertas wrote: »

I want to see a screen-shot of this. Sounds like something that would really drive me crazy! Does it look like NetZero/Juno use to for free Internet?

Our internet is a monopoly between three companies who basically divided the country. We have fast internet up to 50mbps for home available and then they cap the hell out of you making it useless. Then they started raising the fees until now it's pretty much some new bs charge 3x a year. And they throttle everything as well.

dynamik

tiersten wrote: »

My theory doesn't explain why Canada doesn't appear in the list though *shrug*

I guess no one's currently running fiber to the igloo...

veritas_libertas

GAngel wrote: »

Our internet is a monopoly between three companies who basically divided the country. We have fast internet up to 50mbps for home available and then they cap the hell out of you making it useless. Then they started raising the fees until now it's pretty much some new bs charge 3x a year. And they throttle everything as well.

That stinks. I am perfectly happy with my limited speeds then.

wd40

GAngel wrote: »

Our internet is a monopoly between three companies who basically divided the country. We have fast internet up to 50mbps for home available and then they cap the hell out of you making it useless. Then they started raising the fees until now it's pretty much some new bs charge 3x a year. And they throttle everything as well.

Our Internet is Up to 8MB with a throttle of 30GB and you will have to pay 300 US$ per month to get it.

Average speed is 512K to 1MB "throttle 4 - 8 GB" at a cost of 20-50 US$.

tiersten

Evidence that it was guaranteed to be China is shakey. The theory that the algorithm was only used in China is wrong, the IP addresses the attacks came from don't mean much anyway and even Google only think it is probably China.