I recently was made aware of an article from Federal Computer Week entitled Chinese Hackers will Attack Anything and Everything, via This Week in Tech. Whether the Chinese are hacking America’s Defense Department networks is not in question. That’s a fact:

Attacks coming from China, probably with government support, far outstrip other attackers in terms of volume, proficiency and sophistication, said a senior Netwarcom official, who spoke to reporters on background Feb 12.

The conflict has reached the level of a campaign-style, force-on-force engagement, he said.China has also been using spear phishing, sending deceptive mass e-mail messages to lure DOD users into clicking on a malicious URL, the official said. China is also using more traditional hacking methods, such as Trojan horse viruses and worms, but in innovative ways.

The big question is, is this really organanized and encouraged by the state? Or is it just a few punk university students trying to make a name for themselves?

Chinese hackers gained notoriety in the United States when a series of devastating intrusions, beginning in 2003, was traced to a team of researchers in Guangdong Province. The program, which DOD called Titan Rain, was first reported by Federal Computer Week in August 2005.

Following that incident, DOD renamed the program and then classified the new name. That particular set of hackers is still active, the Netwarcom official said. He would not confirm whether the Titan Rain group was linked to the NWC attack or any other recent high-profile intrusions.

I’m not going to speculate as to the answer. Is it possible that a sophisticated cyber-attack could be masterminded by these man-purse toting sleepy-heads? Who knows…

But given the patriotic spirit that seems to exist here in China, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were just punk kids out to score one for the motherland. I wasn’t in China when 911 happened, but I have English-teacher friends who were. They reported that some of their some of Chinese students reacted to the World Trade Center attacks with happiness and applause.

In my own experience when I was an English teacher, I’ve run into quite a few of these more militant students as well:

Me: Johnny, if you had one wish what would you wish for? Eternal Happiness? World Peace? A helicopter?

Johnny: No. If I only had one wish, I’d use it to drop a bomb on Tokyo.

Did I mention that I’ve also seen Osama Bin Laden T-shirt for sale here in China as well? Any opportunity to make a buck… Whatever the case, I sincerely hope that China’s rise is a peaceful one that doesn’t threaten any county, as the party line says it is. But maybe it’s not the government that the west needs to be worried about.

Maybe it’s just the regular dumbasses. China recently announced that there will be no new internet cafes opening in 2007. Maybe the powers-that-be doesn’t want anyone stealing their thunder?

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