China Mafia-Style Hack Attack Drives California Firm to Brink

[MachineGhost]

For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software Inc., Milburn’s family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company’s parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national Internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a $2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April.

In between, the hackers assailed Solid Oak’s computer systems, shutting down web and e-mail servers, spying on an employee with her webcam, and gaining access to sensitive files in a battle that caused company revenues to tumble and brought it within a hair’s breadth of collapse.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-2 ... brink.html

[Ad Orientem]

Chilling.

[dualstow]

Chilling.

I was going to post the exact same word, and only that word, as a response and  that  is in turn chilling. 

[Storm]

What really boggles my mind is that the Chinese government has been doing this with groups loosely affiliated with the PRC and military.  They have hacked numerous large US companies like Google, Microsoft, and Cisco.  They commit industrial espionage in order to gain trade secrets, get an upper hand on international business contracts, and generally outright steal the intellectual property of US companies.

Shouldn't the above be considered acts of war?  If the PRC landed a military vessel in silicon valley, and elite military units started scaling the walls of Apple headquarters in Cupertino, carrying out servers full of source code and design documents, surely there would be a swift and harsh response in the form of military action.

What the PRC is doing is basically the same thing, although digitally.  I suggest in acts of war, the response should be somewhat equal to the offense.  For example, every time a US company gets hacked by the PRC, I think an adequate response might be to disconnect Shanghai and significant parts of china from the Internet.  The US has the capability of doing this.  There are a few undersea cables that provide Internet to most of China.  Of course, our government is probably too toothless to do this because they are all getting kickbacks from companies and lobbyists that outsource to China.

The Internet was created by the investment of the US DOD through DARPA.  We created it and we can take it away (at least the important parts of it - they would still have a ChinaNet).

[Pointedstick]

I have to agree with Storm, but then again, we did the same thing to Iran by blowing up their nuclear reactor with a virus. It's a brave new world of warfare.