I sometimes feel that people who comment here of the Chinese spying stories are the Chinese agents. First comment is always dismissing the story. Is anyone at HN looking where the comments originate?
You're not imagining it. China is executing a full-on "covert" culture/soft-power war. From the Confucius Institutes in US universities to propaganda "news" papers in New Zealand. They have teams of people trying to control the narrative on the internet anywhere China is mentioned. Quora is the worst in my personal experience.
A lot of this is widely reported on by credible news sources. Many current and ex intelligence and defense officials have called out China as the biggest threat to the US over the past year. I can't believe our government is shutdown right now over a "wall" separating us from countries who, in comparison, are our BFFs.
Particularly at the university, I was setting up a GitLab box that wasn’t supposed to be externalized (didn’t realize at the time that LAN utilizes the public addresses instead of NAT). 90K ssh attacks in 3 days, vast majority from the east Asia area. Luckily none made it through. Learned my lesson (and firewalld) from that experience. Nearly had a panic attack from that (first time setting something up like that).
The above was from my naive days before I started getting more deeply involved in sysadmin and networking work. It’s still incredibly annoying to log in to systems with “There have been 173 failed login attempts since the last successful login.”
When I set up my first gateway/router server for the first time, I was truly shocked to see how much traffic comes in searching for vulnerabilities. I knew it happened, but the frequency was wholly unexpected. SSH requests for root, SMB traffic, etc. every second or so.
If you want to see something, install MySql on a AWS EC2 (or any host for that matter), turn on verbose logging and open it to the public internet. I saw thousands of Chinese bots trying every way to get root access
No, I am not a Chinese agent. I don't know how to prove this to you definitively. However, I'd like to ask you if you consider my query legitimate, given that I did not have access to the full affidavit when I asked it, only the original article which was skimpy on the details around the extent of the copying. Mostly, I was more worried that my company could have me arrested either for accessing or copying a file arbitrarily deemed outside of my duties, or for violating their IT policy.
A lot of this is widely reported on by credible news sources. Many current and ex intelligence and defense officials have called out China as the biggest threat to the US over the past year. I can't believe our government is shutdown right now over a "wall" separating us from countries who, in comparison, are our BFFs.
I hope you have your tinfoil hat ready:
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/627249909/australia-and-new-z...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2018/05/22...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-...