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The Military United States

Iranians, Russians, and Chinese Hackers Are After You, Says Lawmaker 211

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the they're-after-our-tubes dept.
Velcroman1 writes "The House Intelligence Committee is warning that 'time is running out' before the next major cyberattack: The Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and others are likely already on your computer. 'You have criminal organizations trying to get into your personal computer and steal your personal stuff. And by the way, the Chinese are probably on your computer, the Russians are probably on your personal computer, the Iranians are already there,' House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R.-MI) said. 'They're trying to steal things that they think are valuable or use your computer to help them steal from someone else,' he said. 'That's a real problem.'"
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Iranians, Russians, and Chinese Hackers Are After You, Says Lawmaker More

Iranians, Russians, and Chinese Hackers Are After You, Says Lawmaker

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  • Not me! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Endo13 ( 1000782 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:08AM (#43412891)

    I'm wearing my trusty tin-foil hat!

  • So we need to snoop on your PC too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:09AM (#43412903)

    just to make sure they aren't and for your own protection.....

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )
        Always figured that if I was ever granted a security clearance it meant someone wasn't doing their job right. Then TSA gave me a TWIC (Transportation Workers Identification Credential) card, and confirmed that suspicion.

  • Wow..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:13AM (#43412945)

    The linked article says it all. Nothing but more fearmongering from Fox News, and promotion of CISPA. Someone needs to have their editor's permissions revoked. oh wait....

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zemran ( 3101 )

      The idea that any Russian hacker would want to steal the ID of some poor US guy is a little dreamy...

    • Forget the article. My question is, how do the Russians and Chinese as well as the Iranians all manage to fit on my computer? I mean, heck, there's hardly enough room for me to stand on the thing myself!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spitzak ( 4019 )

        According to the quote, only the Iranians are on your computer. The Russians and Chinese are still trying to get in.

        I think it is probably best to just wait, the Russians and Chinese will kick the Iranians out, and then fight each other, since there is no way two or three of them will fit in a little computer. You only have to deal with the final winner.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The fox news article says : "Experts say Rogers may be stretching the truth: most people’s computers likely aren’t infected by agents of foreign governments.
      “The Iranians, the Chinese, and the Russians are probably already on my computer? Sheesh ... I guess it must be getting pretty crowded in there,” joked Graham Cluley, a consultant with U.K. Web security company Sophos."
      But don't let me stop your obligatory bashing of fox news. I'm guessing you don't consider your day complete u

      • I find it particularly amusing that people would moan about Fox's factual problems in a post on SLASHDOT of all places. Yea, slashdot really does set that bar high.

      • The fox news article says : "Experts say Rogers may be stretching the truth: most people’s computers likely aren’t infected by agents of foreign governments.

        Where in the article does it say that, though? If they put it far enough down, a significant portion of the readers won't ever see it.

    • Hell, I'm using this... I'm printing this story out and laminating it. If I'm lucky I'll be able to buy a print copy that has this.

      << fast forward to where the US is a fully fascist state, maybe 2015 or so >>

      FBI/other fascist type: Zeroply, explain the 8TB of encrypted data on your home computer?
      Me: To prevent people hacking in and getting my data.
      FBI: The only reason you would need a 4096 bit RSA key, and AES/Twofish/Serpent cascade is to hide things from the government.
      Me: It's to keep the Chi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ZiakII ( 829432 )
        fast forward to where the US is a fully fascist state, maybe 2015 or so

        Fully fascist state and you expect an old newspaper article to protect you. Good luck with all of that....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ZeroPly ( 881915 )
          No, no, no... you misunderstand...

          I'm not looking to get out of trouble. I just want something to laugh about while they're doing the waterboarding...

  • One is for non-critical communications. Other is offline permanently.

  • Oh noes... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmSlDoo ( 414128 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:14AM (#43412967)

    The real problem is normal users that do not really know what is happening on their computers and really do not care.
    It always brings me back to images of windows users with 20 different toolbars loaded in to IE.

  • Lame attempt at distraction there uncle Sam!

  • "criminal organizations" (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You have criminal organizations trying to get into your personal computer and steal your personal stuff.

    You mean like the RIAA/MPAA and the Federal government?

  • big brother anti virus incoming (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Effective immediately: government mandated state controlled anti-virus. Fuck off lawmakers, my PC is clean I don't need your help.

  • Let the Fear Mongering Begin (Score:3)

    by Laebshade ( 643478 ) <laebshade@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:22AM (#43413055)

    What's wrong, Republican Rogers? Has the physical terrorism boogeyman waned to so little that you must now bring out a new candidate?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:24AM (#43413079)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • the same asshole who thought iraq was trying to kill us

      The two are unrelated. We've known that Russian Mafia has been running commercial botnets for, what, a decade? He's hopelessly behind the entire security industry, but he's not proposing a wild, unproven theory.

      It's a mistake to choose politicians based upon who you agree with 100% of the time and who you disagree with 0% of the time. Support them when they're right, rain down righteous indignation when they're not. It's policy, not tribal warfare.

    • banging his wardrum. this is the same asshole who thought iraq was trying to kill us all. how'd that turn out for ya mike? http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17707705/39591107 [nbcnews.com]

      Well, I guess it worked out OK for him because he's been re-elected every election since then. This illustrates exactly what is wrong with the House of Representatives - at the House district level, voting is often about party affiliation only and nobody asks "Is this person deserving of my vote?" Voters just vote based on party affiliation. This does illustrate exactly why I abandoned the Republican Party a few years ago. I couldn't take the willful embrace of idiocy any more. Stupid people used to be

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )
        I think the willful embrace of idiocy was a major plank of the Reagan Revolution.

  • ISP Egress Filtering... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sillivalley ( 411349 ) <sillivalley@nospaM.comcast.net> on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:27AM (#43413107)
    How much of the crap we put up with would go away if ISPs instituted egress filtering?

    Oh, that's not a panacea; it's not going to cure all the interweb's problems overnight, but it would sure as hell eliminate a lot of the low-level crap that goes on.

    (grumble grumble grumble)
    • Comcast egress filters SMTP and CIFS, at least where I live. What sort of low level crap are you thinking of?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        It would fix nearly all DNS-based DOSes if they filtered source addresses of outbound packets to eliminate spoofed UDP packets. If it's leaving their network, the packet should say it came from their network.

        • Spoofed TCP packets are every bit as big as a problem. What do you suppose happens when you send a spoofed TCP Syn packet to google? Might make it pretty difficult to trace where that packet originated, no?

  • My concerns (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xs650 ( 741277 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:35AM (#43413187)
    As a USian, I'm more concerned about US corporations and US government agencies being after me, they are the ones that can do and are most likely to do me some harm. And, I'm not even concerned enough about them to wear a tinfoil hat.

    • Re:My concerns (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @12:04PM (#43413541) Homepage Journal

      As a USian, I'm more concerned about US corporations and US government agencies being after me, they are the ones that can do and are most likely to do me some harm.

      This is probably the most important thing to get across. The US population has been far more damaged by the likes of HUAC and the various secretive "intelligence" agencies than by any foreign bogeymen.

      This isn't just a US problem, either. I've read a few comments from historians on the topic, saying that the data shows that during the last century, far more people (in the world as a whole) died due to their own government's actions than from any foreign soldiers or other attackers.

      The data isn't nearly as good for previous centuries, but what data there is supports the claim for the rest of our history. The biggest danger everywhere comes from our own rulers, who rarely have our interests at heart.

      In the on-topic case of network security, it's fairly clear that the primary interest of the US and all other governments is in controlling the communication of their own citizens.

  • How did they get through the tubes?

  • Unplug that sucker and throw it out the windows, now! Oh wait, it's a Linux box lol.

    For the record, MyWebSearch and Yontoo and Freeze and Babylon are after "you" too and since "you" are an idiot, "you" probably have them on your computer as well. They could have added that to the message too.

  • Always need boogeymen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:49AM (#43413331) Journal

    It could be worse. What if they started flying remote controlled drones around the world killing people with impunity?

  • Microsoft offers the Malicious Software Removal Tool (IA32 version) [microsoft.com] , (AMD64 version) [microsoft.com] which they update monthly. It's not perfect, but it's worth running on Windows machines.

    If Congress wants to apply pressure to somebody, it might be worthwhile to investigate how well that's working, and what it's missing.

  • In order for there to be a next major cyberattack, there must have been a last major cyberattack. When was that?

    Seriously, what constitutes a "cyberattack"? Does it have to be nation-state sponsored, or does a lone script kiddie count? What is the threshold to make it "major"? Does it have to kill more people than 9/11, or is installing an unwanted browser toolbar enough?

    Depending on what your definitions are, a "major cyberattack" might be unlikely to ever happen, or it could be happening *right now*! :-

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )
      That's one of the (many) issues that I have with the "ZOMG Chinese hackers" headlines. China represents 1/4 of the world's population, and has a rapidly growing computer-literate class, and a rapidly growing criminal class. The assumption that every attack from China is authorized/conducted by the Chinese government is absurd, but as we've all seen many times in the past military and political management is consistently a decade or two behind the times so I expect we'll continue to see more of these annou
    • I want to seee the list of majors that have been cyberattacked.

  • One solution for a lot of the ID theft parts ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @12:00PM (#43413503) Homepage

    ... is to require businesses to do a better job of distinguishing between mere identity, and actual authenticated authorization. For example, your SSN is just some numbers that can refer to you. Having an SSN is absolutely not authorization. If someone uses you SSN and a business chooses to charge your or open accounts to allow such charges, then they have failed to obtain authorization. In such a case, it should be required by new sensible law that if you state for the record that you did not authorize the transactions or whatever, then that business may not take any action whatsoever unless and until they can prove that you actually did authorize it. The "not take any action" means they cannot collect on debts, cannot place debts with a debt collector, cannot put it on your credit report (must take it off if already did). It has to be like it never happened.

    The big problem with ID theft is that these businesses are not checking authorization. They need to start checking authorization or simply eat the loss.

    • Starting around ten years ago, we stopped using SSNs for such purposes here in Norway. Not in small part because a certain phone operator leaked a few hundred thousand of them through a poorly-written webpage.
  • If they don't email me a phone number attached as a word document, then they're more welcome than the usual idiots I have to see on my computer.
  • Just more xenophobic alarmism. I'm surprised they didn't mention Israel's spying on the US, since crazy xenophobes also tend to be antisemitic too.
  • The beginning of justifications to monitor all communications and online activities of all Americans at all times.

    It's For Your Safety, Loyal Citizen. After all: if you have nothing to hide...

  • ... are definitely in my computer. I am using Avast! Anti-Virus software.

    Just as long as they aren't constantly reading and writing to my SSD drives... If I catch them doing that I will be pissed....

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Only Losedows systems get broken into. Why not pass a legislation making Losedows illegal? It's not like it's going to be any more unconstitutional then CISPA is already...
  • I'd be an ignorant, prejudiced fool.

  • It's mid-April and this politician in the federal government is trying to explain how it's the evil Russians, Chinese and Iranians that are trying to steal from us?

  • "Connect it to the internet and someone's going to own it!" --Dual Core

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