Technology

The whole "Is hacking an act of war?" thing needs to be seriously reconsidered. Of course, if the US decided it was, they would be guilty of so many acts of war. And it's not just the US. Everybody is trying to hack everybody and acting like killing people by bringing down a power grid is somehow different than killing people by dropping a bomb. The outcome is the same: You did something that intentionally killed people.

Of course saying that hacking is an act of war opens up a huge can of worms. Suddenly small time hackers are being charged with or framed for war crimes.

It's a delicate issue, but I think it is worth revisiting.

I read somewhere they have trouble hiring hackers because they ask if they've ever done drugs including weed and it's an automatic deal breaker for the old farts running the hiring process. Also the pay is shit compared to what they can make in the private sector. I guess leaning on patriotism isn't working anymore.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The operation, announced just before FBI Director Chris Wray addressed House lawmakers, disrupted a botnet of hundreds of U.S.-based small office and home routers owned by private citizens and companies that had been hijacked by the Chinese hackers to cover their tracks as they sowed the malware.

“This is a world where a major crisis halfway across the planet could well endanger the lives of Americans here at home through the disruption of our pipelines, the severing of our telecommunications, the pollution of our water facilities, the crippling of our transportation modes — all to ensure that they can incite societal panic and chaos and to deter our ability” to marshal a sufficient response, she said.

At least a portion of that operation, attributed to a group of hackers known as Volt Typhoon, has now been disrupted after FBI and Justice Department officials obtained search-and-seizure orders in Houston federal court in December.

The U.S. has in the past few years become more aggressive in trying to disrupt and dismantle both criminal and state-backed cyber operations, with Wray warning Wednesday that Beijing-backed hackers aim to pilfer business secrets to advance the Chinese economy and steal personal information for foreign influence campaigns.

U.S. officials have long been concerned about such hackers hiding in U.S.-based infrastructure, and the end-of-life Cisco and NetGear routers exploited by Volt Typhoon were easy prey because they were no longer supported by their manufacturers with security updates.

Because of the urgency, law enforcement officials said, U.S. cyber operators deleted the malware in those routers without notifying their owners directly — and added code to prevent re-infection.

The original article contains 977 words, the summary contains 268 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Attacking civilians is an atrocity

Why do I imagine all those critical infrastructure sites still using Windows 95, maybe a few WinXP