Chinese hackers 'slurped 50 MB of US gov email' The Chinese government may have used its access to Microsoft source code to develop attacks that exploited weaknesses in the Windows operating system, according to a US diplomatic memo recently published by Wikileaks. The June 29, 2009 diplomatic cable claims that a Chinese security firm with close ties to the People's Republic …
Yes there's even* a facebook group "American & Chinese Defective Drywall"
"Victims of Chinese Drywall (VCDW) are calling for action by our President to protect American citizens from toxic imports ...". The Chinese were probably spying on the VCDW ....
*I know, there's a facebook group for everything so "even" is redundant...
As I heard years ago that Microsoft had provided the Chinese with the Windows source code, I really expected something of the sort, but I thought that the victims would have been nationals of the People's Republic. What the Peking people did is a lot more clever.
I wonder whether the build that was disclosed included any backdoor code which may have been planted by US spooks...
Could this be enough to throw in Windows in its final spin?
"“During this time period, the actors exfiltrated at least 50 megabytes of e-mail messages and attached documents,"
So that one email with maybe 50 photos of an office party..........
Not much return for your effort or another case of someone not understanding what size file are....
Thats less than half the bytes than Bill Gates is believed to have spent on his house.....
I thought that Windows source code was a myth - hasn't Mark Russinovich admitted that nobody really understands what's going on inside the the older bits of Windows?
Now, if Wikileaks could get hold of THAT and make it public, it really would be a service to the world.
Paris, because there's nothing else funny in this post.
...yes switch to MacOS / Linux / Unix because there has never, ever, in the enitre history of the OS's been any exploits. Nope, none what so ever...la la la laaaa, no not listening.
Thanks god you don't run our business, we'd have sopftware that doesn't work with the real world and our staff would be twiddling there thumbs waiting for someone to write a decent bit of software to work with.
at least someone has the code necessary to make programs work with windows.
for years legit developers struggled to understand the workings of m$ in order to make functional software.
i'd say let's move towards an adroid style os however my android phone crashes more than any windows 95 box I had so what can one do.
Alternatively, you could just wait a bit and get a lot more from wikileaks.
Or in the UK, have someone follow a public servant and wait for a dropped/forgotten laptop/pen drive/CD (or nick it during their 8am to 5pm nap).
Either of these solutions would take considerably less time, less resources, less skills, and overall cost a lot less.
Based on my experience in the industry, the average email size is ca. 50-75KB depending heavily on the department. There is a common mistake of estimating averages much higher by taking the size of a database and dividing by the number of emails that are supposedly in there. The interesting thing is that even though email size was projected to increase (market research back at the turn of the century,) the average user is more aware of sending large attachments and doesn't. I'll stop rambling.
Based on this, they siphoned less than 1000 emails. If this was targeted, then not bad, but if it was just random emails then it is not much more than a single light profile user might get in a couple of weeks complete with "What are you doing for lunch?" and all the distribution list FYI emails.
For more reading:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.08.exchangesandbox.aspx
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