02.18.10
Clouseau On the NYT Cyberdesk
Dreyfus: Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world.
John Markoff reports from the New York Times:
“[A] leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.??? The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,??? the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.???
At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.
A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name … acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.
Remarkable!
With the Times and the NSA on the trail, the Chinese are for it now. It’ll be a slam dunk. And everyone knows American students in computer science classes don’t hack computers in foreign countries or ever sign up for the military after high school or college. It’s common knowledge.
Clouseau: This is a very serious matter and everyone in this reuoom is under the suspicions.
Pot – Kettle – Black … Oops!
These “zombie” computers are often grouped into “botnets,” or armies of infected computers that can be used to send spam e-mail or attack Web sites, according to McAfee, a Silicon Valley security firm. The company, which said it collects information about Internet-based threats that target more than 100 million computers in 120 countries, said that in the last three months of 2009, about 1,095,000 computers in China and 1,057,000 in the United States were infected.
Those numbers are in addition to 10 million or so previously infected computers in each country, McAfee said.
Excerpted from the WaPo.