I like how they make it seem like China has really leveled up their cybersecurity skillset to be able to hack into these systems. I'd bet money most of the access comes from phishing credentials from humans.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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unless everyone is blatantly lying, it doesn't seem like it:
“This was a very advanced technique used by the threat actor against a limited number of high value targets. Each time the technique was used, it increased the chances of the threat actor getting caught,” said Google Cloud’s Mandiant senior vice president and chief technical officer Charles Carmakal. “Kudos to Microsoft for leaning in, figuring this out, remediating, collaborating with partners and being transparent.”
“Last month, U.S. government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems. Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the U.S. government to a high security threshold.”>
Just because it's a technique doesn't mean it isn't social engineering.
This either happens a lot or it happened a few weeks ago? I guess the official US statement is the news? Is it that the US is doing the same and so can't react too strongly or can they not prove it was the Chinese government? Seems kind of like it should be a bigger deal. Not long before nation-state cyberattacks are going to count similarly to actual nation-state physical attacks.
So at what point do we consider cyberattacks to be acts of war and actually fucking do something more than hand-wringing
What are your expectations here? Bombing Shanghai and toppling the world economy in retaliation for stealing unclassified emails?
Sanctions? More political pressure? Anything but bending over and letting China ream us in the ass? Give them an inch and they take a mile. We KNOW this, so why are we still capitulating?
You are obviously aware that "we" do it all the time as well - but no sane intelligence agency will go out shouting in press "WE DID STEAL CHINESE OFFICIALS' EMAIL FOLKS, OUR AGENTS ARE TOP CYBERCOMMANDOS AMD LAST WEEK WE TOOK OVER A COMPUTER IN IRAN AND RECORDED THEIR MINISTER'S SECRET MEETING" Though actually Americans did go out shouting once recently, calling out Russia before they invaded Ukraine and making sure everyone gets the message "we know what russia is up to and we're ready". It was considered an extraordinary strategy when the sitting US president effectively broadcasted military intel.
How do you politically pressure them exactly? Other countries you might threaten to cut off aid or recind arms deals or refuse plane sales, etc. China doesn't rely on any of those things. In fact Boeing relies on China to buy planes to stay profitable. How are you supposed to sanction your 3rd largest trading partner which your first and second partner also relies on. The allies would either revolt or the global economy goes into depression.
People always talk about sanctions, but unless you're sanctioning Cuba or North Korea, sanctions can be as damaging to the countries doing the sanctioning. Fully sanctioning China would essentially mean cutting ourselves off from the world's top manufacturer, which would hurt the U.S. way more than China now that their domestic economy is in full swing.
Not to mention that most if not will American-based multinationals would never go along with it.
None of what you've described will control China's behavior. The window of opportunity to effectively manage their belligerence was closed shortly after we allowed them into the WTO, which was when we had greater leverage to shoehorn their development than we do now.
Right now we can only manage to have a marginal impact on their behavior with the tools we have now. Everything else is just a waiting game until our economies can adjust and de-risk while looking for more market disruptions with which we can gain an edge over China.
If you really care enough about this, there are plenty of tools to which you can use to gain essential knowledge into cybersecurity and other critical technology sectors, and learn yourself into the field of information security.