Pressure builds on US over Hong Kong civilian hacking allegations

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Political pressure on the United States to address claims that it hacked hundreds of targets in Hong Kong has begun to build in the territory.

Pro-Beijing politicians on Thursday urged the US to clarify whether it had carried out such surveillance, as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged, and if so, immediately cease. Democratic party chairwoman Emily Lau suggested lawmakers should ask the US "what the hell they're up to" and a colleague said he would like Snowden to give evidence to the legislative council.

Snowden said that the US had hacked Hong Kong targets including public officials, businesses, a university and students, as well as entities on the mainland. His claims were made in an interview with the city's South China Morning Post, which said it had seen a document that Snowden said supported his claims. The Post added that it had not verified the material, and has not published it.

The allegations followed a string of revelations in the Guardian based on top-secret documents provided by the 29-year-old, who had worked as a computer technical assistant for Booz Allen Hamilton, on contract to the National Security Agency.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/13/hong-kong-demands-us-answer-hacking-allegations

[Laelth]

1. Wonder how Secretary Kerry is going to handle that one.

I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.

That said, we almost certainly did do that kind of hacking. What's more, our goal is to stay in permanent able-to-hack mode. We do that in this way:

Like safecrackers listening to the click of tumblers through a stethoscope, the “vulnerability researchers” use an extensive array of digital tools to search for hidden weaknesses in commonly used programs and systems, such as Windows and Internet Explorer. And since no one else has ever discovered these unseen cracks, the manufacturers have never developed patches for them.

Thus, in the parlance of the trade, these vulnerabilities are known as “zero-day exploits,” because it has been zero days since they have been uncovered and fixed. They are the Achilles’ heel of the security business, says a former senior intelligence official involved with cyberwarfare. Those seeking to break into networks and computers are willing to pay millions of dollars to obtain them.

We have spent billions finding weakness in all kinds of computer programs that can be exploited. Because we have not exploited those weaknesses yet, the developers who produced that software have not yet patched the programs. They remain vulnerable, and the NSA is just waiting (keeping that software vulnerable) so that we can attack our enemies when (and if) we need to. Snowden (or another leaker) might be able to sell or give away all the holes we spent years discovering. That would severely curtail our cyberwarfare capabilities and would represent a waste of billions of dollars.

This, I think, is why we now punish leakers so severely. It's a deterrent designed to prevent the tens of thousands of other people with this knowledge from leaking it.

-Laelth