China Says a Foreign Spy Agency Hacked Its Airlines, Stole Passenger Records (therecord.media) 20
Chinese officials said last week that a foreign intelligence agency hacked several of its airlines in 2020 and stole passenger travel records. From a report: The hacking campaign was disclosed last week by officials from the Ministry of State Security, China's civilian intelligence, security, and secret police agency. The hacking campaign was discovered after one of China's airlines reported a security breach to MSS officials in January 2020. Investigators said they linked the hacks to a custom trojan that the attackers used to exfiltrate passenger details and other data from this first target. A subsequent investigation found other airlines compromised in the same way. "After an in-depth investigation, it was confirmed that the attacks were carefully planned and secretly carried out by an overseas spy intelligence agency," the MSS said in a press release distributed via state news channels last Monday. The MSS did not formally attribute the attack to any foreign agency or country.
Taiwan? (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan? (Score:4, Insightful)
America, EU, UK, Russia, Japan, India, Pakistan, S. Korea...
They spy on us, we spy on them... We try to stop them from spying on us, and they try to stop us from spying on them...
And everyone is denying that they are spying on anyone else. And we hate those nasty spies, until something surprises us, like an random attack, or a nation having some game changing invention that came out of nowhere. Then we are like, why didn't see this coming, where are our spies to let us know about this.
Re: (Score:2)
That would be more of a North Korea type of action. While China want to give the presence that everything is under control, they are also a major player in the world so, they may want to use some of their more minor flaws public, just so the world will feel like they are the victim too. Besides being able to admit to getting hacked, is often a better sign that you know you security than those who are hacked all the time and don't know it.
Re: (Score:2)
Why did China do this? To deflect from their own hacking efforts. Now they can claim victim status. And as to who could hack them and also recover the ransomware payments noted in the article boils down to one country.
Impossible (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
nk (Score:1)
What will the hackers do? Form a dictatorship? (Score:1)
The irony is the Chinese government is the worst possible agency to have access to this data to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
What are you trying to say?
The Chinese government has legal access to all internal flight records just like the US government has legal access to all US flight records. The US strong-arms a lot more countries into handing over data than the Chinese government does.
How does the CCP like them apples? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the Ministry of Cough and Sneezes swiped the records?
Maybe wildly hacking civil infrastructure is bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, tell us how this feels?
We can certainly tell you how it feels to have aggressive hackers trying to 0wn civil infrastructure all the time.
Wildly hackable infrastructure is bad. (Score:2)
Just saying.
The list of suspects: (Score:2)
United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamaica Peru!
Republic Dominican, Cuba, Carribean, Greenland, and El Salvador Too!
Puerto Rico, Colombia...
you get the point. Everyone wants what you have, be it $ or info or secrets. Therefore, everyone spies on everyone, and those who condemn, decry and prefer we not do such things are children, living in some fantasy safe space.
In the real world, everyone spies on everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
Everybody knows.
https://youtu.be/quwB5eAKh4s?t... [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
The US is possible. They certainly blamed us for a previous set of alleged hacks on their airlines. Not certain it's likely, tho. International passenger data could be interesting, because somebody whose (allegedly) broken US Law could be taking a trip to a country that extradites to the US, but what would we use domestic travel for?
Russia and North Korea are more likely. They do a lot more hacking random things to see whether it's useful.
January of 2020? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a bad thing but (Score:2)
The schadenfreude is strong with this one.