Leaked US cables finger Chinese army hackers for cyber-spying

Leaked US diplomatic cables have provided some of the first hard evidence that the US is engaged in a heated cyberespionage battle with China, a conflict diplomats reckon is showing few signs of cooling off. Diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and released to the media by a third party last week, trace a series of …

[Chris Miller]

Security - we've heard of it

"a complete list of usernames and passwords from an unspecified [US government] agency". The Keystone Kops, presumably?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

@Security - we've heard of it

Don't worry - the hack wasn't that widespread, they only discovered a single password (which everybody used)

[Anonymous Coward]

What's good for the goose?

How is this different from Wenwith Hill?

(Except that it is OK when THEY do it, but it's not OK when "them others" do it?)

[Spasticus]

What title

Where Wenwith Hill, who, what? Oh you meant Menwith Hill

[IPatentedItSoIOwnIt]

Good to see WikiLeaks...

Are keeping the world informed once again.

[Crazy Operations Guy]

Governments spying on eachother?

Who knew? I never knew such things would happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

No crimes have been exposed and the only criminals involved are Assange

Nothing released from anything put out by Wikileaks is either a surprise or anything that remotely shows the Chinese Government involved in an illegal act. No smoking gun, nothing. In fact the only illegal thing in all of this was committed by the people who stole the diplomatic cables. What's not known is how the data got to Wikileaks and who assisted them.

[Dennis Wilson]

I kinda like it

With China's widespread and very public hacking of everything on the planet i can see no problem in returning the favour

I hope the yanks wreck more than just a few chinese computers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Weak

"...the US is engaged in a heated cyberespionage battle with China..."

Hmmm, whoda thunk?

[Paul Crawford]

Methods?

Any sign of them using non-Windows based attacks yet?

So far it seems to be IE and that basket case of security, Adobe (pdf & flash), in the approach.

[Dino Saur]

Not so scary, maybe.

"Websites associated with attacks dating back to 2006 were registered using the same postal code in the central Chinese town of Chengdu that is used by the People's Liberation Army Chengdu Province First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau (TRB)"

Is it just me or is this too stupid to be true. A 'secret spy agency' decides to cyber atack everyone and the first thing they do is register their attack websites to their own, known address??

Next point, they got away with 50 MB of data from emails. That's less than 50 emails where I work (due to MS bloatware).

Watch out world! Those are some scary spies!

[Shakje]

You're assuming that they care about the US knowing who they are

If the US is already not too bothered about making an international incident out of it, why waste time and effort hiding who you are? I'd guess that it's probably quite easy to work out when an attack comes from a foreign superpower, and it would probably be reasonably easy to assume it was China.

[FozzyBear]

Is it just me...

or is this so called "attack" seem just friggin' lame. The capture of a small number of emails. Seriously these are supposedly major economic states with vast resources available, Committing electronic armageddon against each other, Now that'll be news

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what exactly

was in the 50MB of email and from whom it came. Particularly if they did some sort of remote filtering and only took the good stuff.

I imagine that if you had 50M of text only email from Bill Gates' email account that he used to communicate with his VP staff, you'd have some pretty valuable stuff.