Chinese hackers breached National Guard to steal network configurations
The Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Salt Typhoon breached and remained undetected in a U.S. Army National Guard network for nine months in 2024, stealing network configuration files and administrator credentials that could be used to compromise other government networks.
Salt Typhoon is a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that is believed to be affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) intelligence agency. The hacking group has gained notoriety over the past two years for its wave of attacks on telecommunications and broadband providers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, Charter, Windstream, and Viasat.
The goal of some of these attacks was to gain access to sensitive call logs, private communications, and law-enforcement wiretap systems used by the U.S. government.
National Guard network breached for nine monthsA June 11 Department of Homeland Security memo, first reported by NBC, says that Salt Typhoon breached a U.S. state's Army National Guard network for nine months between March and December 2024.
During this time, the hackers stole network diagrams, configuration files, administrator credentials, and personal information of service members that could be used to breach National Guard and government networks in other states.
[...] China's embassy in Washington did not deny the attack but stated the U.S. had not provided "conclusive and reliable evidence" that Salt Typhoon is linked to the Chinese government.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @02:42AM (12 children)
Why are the Chinese like this?
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Tuesday July 29, @04:30AM (8 children)
Exactly how are the Chinese? What are you asking?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @04:44AM (1 child)
US government hacking organizations are almost all elite and very much avoid publicity and have a culture of extreme secrecy. China has more mass-produced barely-better-than-script-kiddies who can sometimes get the job done and don't care at all about whether they get found out or not. The low-hanging fruit are plentiful, so that may be the better approach...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @05:34AM
May not be pro but they sure are cost efficient.
Eg doesn't take much to convince some nutty guys to do it for them [myjournalcourier.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @12:15PM (5 children)
OP here: I would've bet $ (AUS) that you wouldn't have gotten the point. Or, like far too many, you're trying to dodge and cloak the issue with your clever language.
"This": aggression, desiring to cause problems, destructive, conquering, domineering, sick obsession with world domination.
Even though I'm a bit of a mutt, I understand nationalism and other forms of unity. But not when it starts to look like Nazism. I mean real Nazis, not the morons who call Trump et al "nazis", Putin saying he's attacking Ukraine to "de-nazify", and other wordsmithing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 29, @03:09PM (3 children)
1. your question was non-specific anyway, nobody rational would have tried to address it as it is
2. I also pointed out that in today's world, state supported hacking is pervasive (even between allies) as a way to gather intelligence non-available otherwise.
I bet $ (USD?) that relatively few Chinese are as described, the issue is they concentrated on the top of political power.
As to why a percentage of humans turn to be socio/psychopaths, do you really expect a simple answer?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @11:11PM (2 children)
I wish I had studied psychology. I would love a better glimpse into brains like yours. My "this" was in reference to, get ready for it, TFA and TFS. Get it now?
No? The "this" is Chinese aggression. Chinese constantly digging, meddling, breaking in, hacking, cracking, malware-izing, ... is that enough? You know, again, what the article and summary are about.
You just like to be very argumentative. You're pretty clever verbally, but that doesn't make you right.
I will agree with your second point. Throughout history a few bad a-holes at the top can cause an amazing amount of destruction and death.
That said, I have direct experience with a Chinese guy who was working in the US in very high-tech / medical software / research. One day he said "we will rule the world" and he meant it. I deem it anti-social on the biggest scale.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30, @12:20AM
That's not Chinese specific, nor "present time" specific. Example [theguardian.com]
You'd be depriving yourself from a larger context if you were to indeed look for an answer to your "evident" question.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30, @12:38AM
Potential explanation or a fragment of such [wikipedia.org] - the treatment they received from Russia after 1945 [wikipedia.org] didn't help.
See also the Chinese take on the specific of face [wikipedia.org] (your rant about "brains like mine" aso, which add nothing to the discussion, may be caused by a similar need of yours. But that's a thing I'll never know, so I won't waste time on it)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31, @08:06AM
Probably because US politicians and high-ranking military officials and civil servants have been calling them an enemy and talking about the need to fight a war against them for the past decade+ and have been arming Taiwan and training separatists/promoting radical islamist ideologies while doing their best to suppress to country. Do you expect them to bend over and enjoy it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @05:39AM (2 children)
There was a comment a while back about how a Chinese parent at an American soccer game saw how the ref missed a foul, but the kid acted as though it had been seen. The kid could have totally gotten away with it! The parent just couldn't understand how the kid didn't run with it -- dishonest, sure, but to the kid's own gain. How not?!
Some Chinese movies reflect Strength in the State, Truth and Justice -- moral ideals; other Chinese movies represent like the above: stories of people trying to get by, shenanigans, and doing whatever they can get away with (scams that leave them looking blue in the face when they inevitably get caught, and narrowly escaping retribution).
I see it more with abject poverty. If they're living on the street, they do anything they need to do to survive. When you bring them up, that doesn't leave them... but maybe their kids, if it doesn't get ingrained to some degree. It could take 2-3 generations to change the mindset. It varies a little bit, but it seems like the up-and-coming generation isn't having to work *as* hard, isn't having to _scrape_ by, and generally doesn't need to do *literally* anything they can to survive and have a decent quality of life. Consider: Apparently the decimal point didn't mean "tenths" in American society until around 1970. Consider that your grandparents would have thought "1.5", with respect to the weight of a bag of potatoes, was one pound five ounces. (Look it up, for real.)
My personal take. China succeeded in industrialization only recently. It was taken advantage of until what, 1980? They had culture and history since forever, but at the same time, thinking of rural china, groups of people moving to the cities -- or trying -- and bribing government officials to even be able to. Those people, scraping by however they could, growing up working in factories that would take complete advantage of them (to the point that they died). No one cared about them. Why should they care about anyone? Lie, cheat, steal. Anything that you can get away with, anything to make your life better. Impress that life-lesson on your kids: anything to make your life better, makes your life better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @12:27PM
OP here, wow, thank you, extremely good post! Makes really good sense, and there's optimism and hope for the future. That maybe people will become more awakened and realize there's no long-term good coming from being so aggressively destructive. For example I hope they all chill out about Taiwan (which is obviously a huge factor in their aggression (stupidly)).
As a US male, single, some years ago I started noticing the various "mail order bride" websites. I never pursued any, and largely because a good friend who has lived in many parts of the world, including Russia and other ex-Soviet countries, strongly warned me about how they grew up having to be very aggressive just to survive. But also learning how to be very verbally clever, sneaky, and manipulative.
Sure enough, another friend found and married a Russian woman and shortly after the marriage and her US citizenship, she "took him to the cleaners". One of her many tactics, that's far too easy and prevalent, was to lie in court saying he beat her. I know the guy well. In fact he's one of those people who seems to know thousands of people. He's just not violent, at all, ever.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @06:22PM
The problem they will run into is that cheating and corruption doesn't innovate. They are tied forever to copying and cheating - and on some level they know it. Thus a permanent inferiority complex - rightly earned. And we... import them into our institutions and to do science. Bravo.
(Score: 2) by hopdevil on Tuesday July 29, @03:22AM (3 children)
Does getting caught mean you are bad at operations or is this the equivalent of a stake in the ground, "I've [publicly] gotten this far"?
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday July 29, @03:46AM
Just a kind of Dou Qi sect, building their name in Jianghu.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday July 29, @05:19AM (1 child)
Does getting caught mean you are bad at operations or is this the equivalent of a stake in the ground, "I've [publicly] gotten this far"?
Probably the latter, they are just declaring publicly how far they got in those particular systems or are just making some noise on the way out to let the proprietors know who was in there now that they are done and would otherwise remain undetected.
Salt Typhoon / Red Mike is the direct result of the hard coded back doors mandated by CALEA and CALEA2. The early articles used to mention that legislation by name, and even point out that all the right people warned of the danger in advance. Now the articles try to misdirect attention from the reality that these back door are still required by law, the back doors are still present, and those hard coded, mandated back doors are still letting the CCP and everyone else run freely through US networks with impunity.
There is collateral damage outside the US related to the inability to check for and remove back doors before deployment: Public money, public code [publiccode.eu]. Inside the US, this is a problem they brought on themselves through mandating back doors. Furthermore, there are no serious technical reasons to ever be using closed source, proprietary software within national computing infrastructures. However, declining educational abilities at a global scale affect that be reducing those actually able to work with ICT to near zero. Yes, there are some people here and there who do learn ICT in spite of what goes on in place of education at college. But they are the exception and not the rule.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29, @05:20AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday July 29, @02:34PM
They provided nothing at all other than saying "they did it".
The whole cyber scene is taking a page from "believe all women" to "believe all glowies".
Because god knows the US government has never lied to anyone about anything in the past.