china

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.

The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.

The time has come to suspect any new hard disk you buy and install in your systems. According to this article, 1800 Maxtor disks of the size 500Gb comes with a bonus off the shelf.

If you install the disks, you get a virus too.  Actually, as soon as you pick it up in the store, you get the virus. It is already installed on the device.

According to the article, the virus will upload any and all data on the device to two online database.  Also according to the article, most disks of this size are bought by governmental agencies. And thus, the Chinese must have installed the virus. (The newspaper is in Taipei).

Obviously this kind of automatic back-up solution is not in the best interest of it's customers, so Seagate-Maxtor has pulled the disks from the market. 

The interesting part in my opinion is that this kind of virus is not getting caught by AV-scanners. One reason is the low volume (number of infected devices). Another reason is that the device is likely to be installed, presumed clean, and just kicked into action. Not until the server-install AV client starts its weekly scan, will the virus be detected - IF and only IF the signature of the virus is in the AV client.

What can you learn by this?

• Never trust ANY hardware you bring into your perimeter
• ALWAYS check EVERYTHING you install in your systems and network - in a safe environment. For hard drives, that means testing, low-level formating and signing them off in a secure, non-connected environment. You do have that, right?
• As security gets tighter, threats evolve and finds other ways to get to you. It is a long time since boot-virus traveled by floppies. But if slow distribution is the easiest, most cost efficient way to hit you, that is how it will be done.
  
• Targeted attacks are increasingly common. We are leaving the days where the goal was to hit as many as possible. The goal today is cash - not attention.
  

I meet many people who still believe that face recognition and other automatic surveillance systems is not available on a large scale. I keep saying that they are wrong.

According to Liquidmatrix, now China is on the track as well: 

 At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

What is even more disturbing in the article is the chips they are distributing to the population - it includes privacy data - birth history, work history, contact info: 

 Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy.

Still not convinced, are you?

Consider that human rights has many different faces - and they tend to stay strong in the so-called western world. Move out of US, Canada or Europe, and they soon start to melt away. Go far enough (not even so far as China), and they are considered interesting and funny ideals.

We scream for respect, and they laugh! 

But you do not have to go to China for this sort of things - UK - with its DNA database, and anti-terror policies, has been considered the Police State of Europe. And Monaco has a long history of being the country with most surveillance in Europe for many years.   

I believe it is evident. We are moving back in time. Back to 1984. But we do not care, because we are living in the Brave new world!