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The New York Times is reporting:
Five Chinese hackers were indicted by the United States Justice Department this week, charged with being part of a Chinese military unit that has hacked the computers of prominent American companies to steal commercial secrets, presumably for the benefit of Chinese companies.
Much about them remains murky. But Chinese websites, as well as interviews with cybersecurity experts and former hackers inside and outside China, reveal some common traits among those and other hackers, and show that China's hacking culture is a complex mosaic of shifting motivations, employers and allegiances.
Many hackers working directly for the Chinese government are men in their 20s and 30s who have been trained at universities run by the People's Liberation Army and are employed by the state in myriad ways. Those working directly for the military usually follow a 9-to-5 weekday schedule and are not well paid, experts and former hackers said. Some military and government employees moonlight as mercenaries and do more hacking on their own time, selling their skills to state-owned and private companies. Some belong to the same online social networking groups.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by SethBrown on Saturday May 24 2014, @12:25PM
Ok, so they try ssh. Hey, they do this becoz it works. Enough idiots out there still don't get security.
I got a call for help on an Asterisk PBX. Comedy of errors. The network admin had NOT enabled the firewall. The PBX admin had set the root password to 111111.
There were 3 different ssh sessions going from IP addresses inside China. A bunch of crontab entries for downloading and re-downloading executables from some website.
As of last night, the root password is exactly the same. I have spoken to the guy about it several times. Water off a duck's back.
What can you do? Human stupidity is endless.
(Score: 1) by LoRdTAW on Saturday May 24 2014, @06:23PM
Oh, its not water off a ducks back. Its "holy shit I might loose my job if this comes to light. I'll just keep quiet and try to figure a way to fix this." But the fix never comes as its too difficult or will break something that will cause down time. So they cover their eyes and ears and say "la la la la I cant hear you and I don't see anything wrong".