Tea at Trianon: How China Hacked America

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 26, 2014

How China Hacked America

From Ars technica:

In 2008, according to the indictment, the hackers sent e-mails to 19 senior employees at aluminum-maker Alcoa in Pennsylvania. The account of the sender impersonated a member of the company's board of directors. The message included malware in an attachment "disguised as an agenda for Alcoa's annual board meeting." The attack led to the theft of more than 2,900 e-mail messages and 863 attachments, "including internal messages among Alcoa senior managers" discussing a Chinese acquisition, according to the indictment.

In 2010, a sole employee of United States Steel was targeted with a spear-phishing e-mail. The attack provided "hostnames and descriptions for more than 1,700 servers, including servers that controlled physical access to the company's facilities and mobile device access to the company's networks." And in 2012, a spear-phishing attack allowed the hackers to access "network credentials for virtually every employee" at Allegheny Technologies, which has some 9,500 full-time workers in the aerospace, defense and "specialty materials solutions" sectors.

The indictment also said that the Chinese military gained access to Westinghouse secrets to build nuclear power plants and hijacked e-mails from its chief executive officer in 2010. Between 2010 and 2012, the Chinese military was accused of stealing a total of at least 1.4 gigabytes of data, "the equivalent of roughly 700,000 pages of e-mail messages and attachments, from Westinghouse's computers." (Read more.)