The Dark Visitor

Book title: Chinese hackers

No doubt, many of you are wondering what to get us for the holidays. Well, worry no more, China’s Xinhua Online Bookstore has you covered.

Checked out their selection on hacking and found a total of 270 books on the subject.  While many of these are just translations from the US and other sources, they did have original manuscripts such as the one above.

Got bored after the first hundred or so titles and a thought hit me, what would happen if I searched for books on the Falun Gong (法轮功)?

Looking for “Taiwanese Independence” and “Free Tibet” simply returned zero hits.

(Amazon.cn also kicked me off for Falun Gong search)

NOTE: The thing about holiday gifts was a joke, a JOKE.  Sometimes my online humor doesn’t translate very well and I get e-mails asking if I was serious.

 I so wish I could steal that title from Maarten…

The really nice thing about having a blog is that you get to interact with people who are much smater than you; Jumper, Eastwood, 回声, Richard…you get the point.  Well, a new member of the “much smarter than me club” is Maarten Van Horenbeeck.  Maarten was nice enough to contact me and share some of his research on targeted attacks and information operations.  Maarten’s summary from his presentation at 24C3 on targeted attack patterns :

In essence, I looked into targeted attacks against the Falun Gong community, as they are still taking place today. I list some of the unique features (such as “domain parking”) some of these attacks have, and briefly touch on ways to better defend corporate networks. Naturally, there was too little time in one hour to cover it all. Finally, I show a small map that illustrates the complexity of a single attack series over a total of 8 months.

Being retired Army, I am a sucker for a good presentation and Maarten delivers in spades.

Want to share two more of the slides from his presentation because these pointed out that Maarten isn’t just a tech guy, he has researched Chinese strategy and truly understands it.  He also points out the targeting methodology of the attacks in the pre-attack stage.  This is something I have referred to as net reconnaissance, similar to probing operations.

Here is Maarten’s blog site, the rest of his presentation “Crouching Powerpoint, Hidden Trojan” and from the 243C conference (torrent vids included). Also, wanted to include this link to Chinese strategic thinking, Learning from the Stones.

Many thanks to Maarten for letting me share this!