My Personal Army
Anyone who lives in China will know the importance of personal security. Things can get a little hairy from time to time and unless you have someone watching your back you never know when you’ll wake up in a bathtub of ice with your vital organs missing. To this end I have employed a private security unit to take care of my physical protection. While this might seem like a lot of people for the defence of one man you’ve got to remember we’re dealing with economies of scale here. An army in China costs a lot less that it would elsewhere and you’d be surprised just how much you can get for your money.
At a glance you can tell this crack unit of ex-PLA special force operatives are the best of the best and one can understand how they got the name “flying dragons”. Seen here parading outside my apartment notice how they are wearing urban camouflage to blend in with the surroundings for minimal visual impact while I go about my daily routine. Local triad gangs beware, ninjas have nothing on these guys.
No expense has been spared to equip them with the latest technology including these Segway weapon platforms with miniature assault rifles capable of firing up to 100 peas per-minute on fully automatic mode. The unique sitting position allows for greater stability and manoeuvrability while firing.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this insight into my personal army and consider this a warning to those who would contemplate doing me harm 
Chinese Cyber Espionage Exposed
In what will come as no surprise to many the Information War Monitor has exposed a Chinese hacking group (the so called GhostNet) who had infiltrated over 1000 computers in over 100 countries, 30% of which were considered to be “high-value” targets (i.e. belonging to government agencies, international organisations etc.). Perhaps most telling were the number of foreign embassy’s infected and possible targeting of Taiwan and the Dalai Lama in particular.
The Trojan horse program, typically spread through email attachments, gave the attackers complete control of the infected computers allowing them search and download files, log keystrokes, and control attached devices such as webcams or microphones. Command servers were identified and traced to be in mainland China (Hainan, Guangdong, Sichuan and Jiangsu) as well as one in Hong Kong and the US. Hainan Island is home to the Lingshui signals intelligence facility of the People’s Liberation Army although no concrete evidence could be found to link them.
Even more worrying is the fact that because of the inherent insecurity of the Internet’s design almost anyone can mount a cyber-attack with easily downloadable hacking tool-kits and a basic understanding of the technology. Whilst these intrusions were traceable to IP addresses in China there is no evidence to be able to say whether the activity was government sanctioned or just a kid in his bedroom. Catching those responsible who are more likely than not on the other side of the world under different jurisdiction is almost impossible currently. China has denied any involvement and described the study as “nonsense”.
Whilst little is known of the current sophistication of cyber espionage it is believed that the US, UK, and Israel are currently leaders in this field and clearly China wants a part in it. Most previous cyber attacks such as those in the Russia-Georgia conflict have been tracked to nationalistic individuals acting alone.
The report, which covers the findings of their 10 month investigation, is fascinating reading if you’re interested in computer security and the technicalities of how these attacks work. For more on the inner mind of cyber criminal organisations in China check out The Dark Visitor blog.
Attached to a Captcha
While CAPTCHA’s are supposed to keep the evil spammers of the world at bay there is no doubt that they are an annoyance to the end user. Most involve deciphering a string of mangled characters in an image which you must get right before you can complete a transaction of some sort (e.g. for signing up to an email service or posting on a forum).
Theoretically only humans can correctly identify the characters and hence proceed but in recent years many variations have been allegedly defeated by advanced optical character recognition software (check out this Chinese website which tells you how difficult each type is to crack and how much it costs to do so). It seems to have turned into a game of cat an mouse between the hackers and those trying to stop them with ever more elaborate variations. A friend of mine discovered this one today when trying to download something from RapidShare -
What on earth is “only enter symbols attached to a cat” supposed to mean??!! Am I lacking optical cat recognition abilities? For the life of me I can’t see any cats in there (let alone attached ones)! After multiple failed attempts it turned out that the answer to this one was DTEC. It seems we have a problem.
As it turns out, this isn’t the only crazy CAPTCHA out there and whilst captcha is a “good enough” solution in most cases there has to be a better solution to this madness, even if it’s just to improve the usability of the current system. Any takers?