Google says it will soon know the identity of hacking culprit

[GoFlyKiteNow]

Google says it will soon know the identity of hacking culprit
Tuesday 23rd February, 2010

Investigators for Google have said they are homing in on the direct sources of the cyber attacks that have hit a number of US companies.

The Financial Times has reported that US investigators have tracked the author of the code used to attack Google, and have described the hacker as a Chinese freelance security consultant.

Officials told the FT that the Chinese man had published extracts of the attack code on the web, perhaps at the behest of the Chinese government.

The attacks allegedly hit more than 30 companies and human rights activists, after a security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser was breached to launch the attacks.

The hole has since been patched.

 

[longbow]

Hope Microsoft gives this Chinese programmer a good job. I would if I were MS.

It is up to big orgs like Google to secure their sites. There are hackers from all over the world that take it as a challenge to get into thee sites. So if you site can be hacked you need better programmers!!

Here is a hacking contest organized by none other than NSA!!

As you can see there is a lot of talent in China. Out of the 894 Chinese entrants in this contest, I am sure most are youths with interest in computers. But I am sure most, if they want, can join the PLA cyber security unit if they want. But then why do that when MS, Google will be willing to hire them. These guys are not the pieces meal assembly type software programming work that is done in India and Silicon Valley. But the conceptual brains that can see the whole picture. These guys and are the architects and civil engineers not the construction workers!


China embarrasses US in NSA hacking contest
National Security Agency-backed TopCoder Open competition raises big questions
By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld ShareThis


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Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.


Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the US needs improvement may spur debate. But of the 70 finalists in it, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and only two from the US.

TopCoder, which runs software competitions as part of its software development service, operates TopCoder Open, an annual contest.

About 4,200 people participated in the US National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.

Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone - from student to professional - and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.

China's showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.

Of the total number of contestants, 93 percent were male, and 84 percent were aged between 18 and 24.
Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, said the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education.

"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there," Hughes said. He said the US needs to make earlier inroads in middle schools and high school math and science education.

That's a point Hughes is hardly alone on. President Barack Obama, as well as many of the major tech leaders including Bill Gates, have called for similar action.

Of the participants in the contest, more than 57 percent had bachelor's degrees, most in computer science, and of that 20 percent had earned a masters degree, and 6 percent a PhD.

But the winner of the algorithm competition was an 18-year-old student from China, Bin Jin, who went by the handle "crazyb0y". Chinese programmers have a history of doing very well in this contest.

Mike Lydon, TopCoder's CTO, said Jin's future in computer science is assured. "This gentleman can do whatever he wants," he said.
The participants are tested in design, development, architecture, among others, but one of the most popular is the algorithm coding contest.

To give some sense of difficulty, Lydon provided a description of a problem that the contestants were asked to solve:

"With the rise of services such as Facebook and MySpace, the analysis and understanding of such networks is a particularly active area of current computer science research. At an abstract level, these networks consist of nodes (people), connected by links (friendship).

"In this problem, competitors were given the description of two such networks, but with the names of all the nodes removed from each. The networks were each scrambled up before given to the competitors. The task was to determine if the two networks could possibly be from the same group of people.

"The competitors were to unscramble and label the two networks so that if Alice was connected to Bob in one of the two networks, then Alice was also connected to Bob in the other network. This problem is known as the network isomorphism problem, and solving it for large networks is a major unsolved problem in the realm of theoretical computer science."

Lydon said the overall problem is unsolved for larger networks, and what's considered a correct answer for this problem would not be considered large enough for the solution in this case to be groundbreaking.

Two people solved the problem.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/mana...le-management/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsId=15144

 

[longbow]

Anyone know if Google has left China? Here is latest on the google hacking story. It now seems like it was done by amateurs and not the Chinese Gov.

Study: Google-China attack driven by amateurs
By Kevin Voigt, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Study: Google-China computer attack appears to have been deployed by amateurs
The "botnet" used to deploy attack used unsophisticated software with five-year-old code
Researcher: "I would say this particular botnet group was not well funded" or state-sponsored
Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- The computer attack which led Google to threaten leaving China and created a firestorm between Washington and Beijing appears to have been deployed by amateurs, according to an analysis by a U.S. technology firm.

"I would say this particular botnet group was not well funded, in which case I would not conclude they were state sponsored, because the level of the tools used would have been far superior to what it was," said Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research at Damballa, an Atlanta-based company that provides computer network security.

However, Ollmann points out that the attackers -- who emanated from China -- could have been contracted by outside parties to launch the attack. And while the deployment of the attack wasn't sophisticated, the Internet Explorer software vulnerability it exploited to infiltrate Google was.

On January 12, Google charged that Chinese hackers targeted Google and more than 20 other Western companies in December and e-mail accounts of Chinese dissidents abroad had been compromised. As a result, Google threatened to pull its operations out of China, which has the most Internet users in the world.

The incident launched a diplomatic spat between Beijing and Washington, including a January 21 speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on Internet freedom in which she decried an "information curtain" descending on the world.

McAfee Security Insights blog called the Google incident a "sophisticated, multi-vector attack."

Critics allege that the attacks were sponsored or condoned by the Chinese government, something Beijing has strongly denied. "I would like to emphasize that accusations that say the government support hacking activities are groundless and are of ulterior motives," said Qin Gang, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at a February 23 press conference.

On the face of it, research by Damballa appears to support Beijing's claims.

If the security hole in Internet Explorer was the smoking gun of the attacks, what Ollmann and his researchers looked at was "the occupants and driver of the getaway van," he said. They analyzed the global network of computers that attackers remotely used to deploy the attack, called a "botnet" -- computers that, unbeknownst to owners, are taken over remotely and used to spread malicious software, or malware.

What Damballa researchers found in the Google attack botnet was less '007' and more 'DIY,' using software that could be found and downloaded widely on the Internet. "This team launching the attack were unsophisticated amateurs," Ollmann said.

The botnet used in the attack began being tested in July, nearly six months before the attack, according to Damballa analysis.

He added, "Some of the codes within the malware were at least five years old" -- ancient, by software development standards. The attackers used technology "that had been abandoned by professional botnet operators years ago," he said.

The findings seem to support evidence that the attacks were promulgated by patriotic hackers in China rather than a government-sponsored conspiracy. But in the murky world of cybercrime, motives are often hard to pin down.

The program that took advantage of the flaw found in the Internet Explorer software has been traced to two educational institutions in China, including one with alleged close ties to the military, the Financial Times reported.

China dismisses these reports. "The two schools have issued clarification statements stating they are not involved in the Internet hackings," said Qin, the foreign affairs spokesperson, on February 23. "The reports on the hacking are completely not true and groundless."

Cybercrime experts say that governments sometimes direct or encourage illegal botnet operators to launch attacks. When Russia and Georgia fought in August 2008, there is evidence that outside groups were contracted to help launch cyber attacks on Georgia's information systems, said Eugene Spafford, a computer security specialist at Purdue University who has advised two U.S. presidents and numerous companies and government agencies

Added Ollmann, "The way that any small botnet operator profits is to extract valuable information that they sell, or the second route is to sell or rent the machines they have access to."

But a spokesperson for the Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference -- China's powerful political advisory body -- told reporters Tuesday that China does not tolerate hackers.

"Chinese laws and regulations strictly prohibit hacker attacks of any kind, and have laid down legal punishment for those offenders," said Zhao Qizheng, according to state press. "I myself have been attacked by hackers, and I strongly detest hackers."