The New York Times reports that the foreign ministries of the Czech Republic, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia and Hungary have been hacked by the Chinese (“traced to Chinese hackers”). As we’ve said before, however, “hacked,” as used in popular media, is an incredibly broad term meant to encompass a wide variety of malicious online activity, when in fact its actual connotation is much narrower, signifying a sort organized, targeted attack against an individual or institution. In our digital age, we’d do well to employ more specific words when the occasion calls for it — “phishing,” for instance, which is what appears to have happened with the above European countries.

Phishing, as defined by Wikipedia, is the act of attempting to obtain sensitive information “by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.” So how exactly did the Chinese phish foreign diplomats?

The attackers sent their targets emails with a link that claimed to contain naked photos of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, wife of former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Please take this sage advice offered by the Wire: “Web safety pro tip #1: Don’t click on sketchy, porny, emailed links from someone you’ve never met. Especially when using your government-issued work laptop.”

This account is unverified, of course, as no one wanted to talk to the Times. Still, knowing human nature, it makes sense: even diplomats, who we think of in the dourest of terms, have an innate interest in nekkid celeb pics.

The world is a better — stronger, more united — place if this story is true.

China Is Tied to Spying on European Diplomats (NY Times, h/t Alicia) (Image via)

Hackers have infiltrated the local government website of the city of Shaoxing, Zhejiang province (sx.gov.cn) and replaced four of the five pictures in the “featured images” slider with mooncakes that display unflattering messages against the Chinese government.

As first noticed by Yaxue Cao, here are screenshots of the website and the offending mooncakes, which read: “Bite to Death the CCP” (Communist Party of China), “Overthrow CCP,” “Bitterly Hate CCP,” and “Get Lost, CCP.”

As of this moment, the subversive mooncakes are still on the website’s frontpage. Let’s see how long it takes someone to notice.

Mid-Autumn Festival is Thursday, during which mooncakes are given as gifts and subsequently re-gifted, and re-gifted again, and again, until someone throws them away.

North Korea Tech and Tech in Asia have a wonderful story about the perils of hacking — you can end up hooking the wrong fish.

On June 25 — the anniversary of the Korean War — affiliates of Anonymous sought to take down North Korea websites, but wound up spraying fire at friends. “Confusion at start of attack,” writes North Korea Tech:

Perhaps a sign of the chaotic nature of the Anonymous hacker collective came shortly after the attacks got underway at midnight local time in Korea. One of the first targets turned out to be one of the most vocal Anonymous members on Twitter.

And then the South Korean president’s website was hit.

And then, eventually, Shandong province, China:

Although the reason is unclear, OpNorthKorea hackers attacked a government website for Zibo City, a provincial city in Shandong, China.

As Charlie Custer of Tech in Asia writes:

At the risk of incurring the wrath of the hacker collective, I must say that while I’m personally in favor of increased transparency from all governments, I’m not all that impressed by the mass website defacement that seems to be the group’s raison d’etre these days.

Edward Snowden sat down with the South China Morning Post yesterday, causing the editors of that Hong Kong-based paper to somewhat lose their minds with SCOOP FEVER. (Which article do I link to? The 3:31 am one that has EXCLUSIVE splashed across the headline — even though Snowden’s spoken with several media outlets already — or the one from 19 minutes later, or the one from 7:37 am on the same subject? There’s another version from earlier, 12:52 am.)

Snowden reveals to SCMP’s Lana Lam that he has been in Hong Kong since May 20, and that:

“I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the US government in the courts, because I have faith in HK’s rule of law.”

And:

“People who think I made a mistake in picking HK as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice, I am here to reveal criminality,” he said.

Also, presented in bullet point, Snowden apparently said:

• US National Security Agency’s controversial Prism programme extends to people and institutions in Hong Kong and mainland China;
• The US is exerting “bullying’’ diplomatic pressure on Hong Kong to extradite him;
• Hong Kong’s rule of law will protect him from the US;
• He is in constant fear for his own safety and that of his family.

Finally, there’s this revelvation — which he told the Guardian earlier, though not with numbers — that the US government, yes indeed, hacks other countries, countries like China.

Snowden believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.

“Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer. Every level of society is demanding accountability and oversight.”

Because it’s Hong Kong, of course there’s a march planned, for Saturday at 3 pm. More info on the Support Snowden website.

Edward Snowden: US government has been hacking Hong Kong and China for years (SCMP) (Image via Sina Weibo via SCMP)

In a Q-and-A with the Guardian, Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who is now in Hong Kong, talked about his motivations, the “authoritarian mindset” of spies (such as himself), and why he does not expect to ever return to the US as a free man.

He also said this about hacking, specifically the hypocrisy of any government complaining about Chinese hacking:

Q: What about the Obama administration’s protests about hacking by China?

A: “We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese government can also intercept anything and everything. If only anyone cared, or were allowed to.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower answers the essential questions on the biggest leak in NSA history (The Guardian, h/t Jonathan Alpart)

We know this because Barbara Demick and the Los Angeles Times have found a blog kept by a 25-year-old hacker, a computer whiz who goes into work at 8:30 am in a military uniform and often stays late — because, you know, office jobs suck.

With no money and little free time, he found solace on the Internet. He shopped, chatted with friends and courted a girlfriend. He watched movie and television shows. He drew particular inspiration from the Fox series “Prison Break,” and borrowed its name for his blog.

The blog provides a rare peek into the secretive hacking establishment of the Chinese military, which employs thousands of people in what is believed to be by far the world’s largest institutionalized hacking operation.

In the blog, the young man, surnamed Wang, does a lot of poetic complaining, par for the course for bloggers:

“Fate has made me feel that I am imprisoned,” he wrote in his first entry on Sina.com. “I want to escape.”

He posted about 625 entries between 2006 and 2009.

“What I can’t understand is why all the work units are located in the most remote areas of the city,” Wang wrote in an entry in 2007. “I really don’t get what those old guys are thinking in the beginning. They should at least take us young people into consideration. How can passionate young people like us handle a prison-like environment like this?”

And despite being very competent at his work, he received, it seems, little recognition from his superiors:

“If we’re lucky enough, we might be able to complete this year’s target and earn a year-end bonus for everyone,” Wang wrote with enthusiasm.

Otherwise, Wang poured out his unhappiness. The hackers were required to speak English, the international language of technology, as well as an essential for phishing attacks on mostly U.S. targets. But when Wang tried to hone his English skills by reading magazines such as the Economist and Harvard Business Review, his boss rebuked him for reading too much foreign press.

“The boss doesn’t understand. I’ll have to be more careful,” he complained. Wang was also unhappy that supervisors refused to reimburse him for a $1 bus ticket to attend a business conference, while his boss claimed more than $100 for a bottle of liquor.

Who can’t empathize?

He also really regretted his career choice, like a lawyer:

“My only mistake was that I sold myself out to the country for some minor benefits and put myself in this embarrassing situation,” he wrote. With the help of his family, he managed to get out in 2008. He stopped writing the blog a year later.

Chinese hackers: they’re just like us. Only, you know, wearing PLA uniforms in the office, and hated on by Mandiant, everyone else.

China hacker’s angst opens a window onto cyber-espionage (LA Times)

Groupthink is an amazing thing. The publicity surrounding attacks on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Facebook, Apple, et al. proves nothing except the saw about propaganda: if you say something often enough, it becomes truth.

A quick scan through English-language China news reveals that on the basis of one report, it is now indisputable fact that a Chinese military organization was responsible for the above-mentioned attacks. So far, the only substantive criticism of Mandiant’s report has come from Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Taia Global, who says the report has “critical analytic flaws.”

In summary, my problem with this report is not that I don’t believe that China engages in massive amounts of cyber espionage. I know that they do – especially when an executive that we worked with traveled to Beijing to meet with government officials with a clean laptop and came back with one that had been breached while he was asleep in his hotel room.

My problem is that Mandiant refuses to consider what everyone that I know in the Intelligence Community acknowledges – that there are multiple states engaging in this activity; not just China. And that if you’re going to make a claim for attribution, then you must be both fair and thorough in your analysis and, through the application of a scientific method like ACH, rule out competing hypotheses and then use estimative language in your finding. Mandiant simply did not succeed in proving that Unit 61398 is their designated APT1 aka Comment Crew.

And that about sums it up. With so many other actors out there, any attribution that does not conclusively exclude them (Russia, Israel, France, and others) should be taken with many grains of salt. Mandiant has made minimal effort to rule out other possibilities, demonstrating the type of confirmation bias that a wary and responsible press would do well to question.

On top of that, the New York Times even admits that while the email accounts of David Barboza (Shanghai bureau chief) and Jim Yardley (former Beijing bureau chief, now South Asia bureau chief) were compromised, no documents pertaining to the Wen Jiabao story “were accessed, downloaded, or copied,” in the words of Jill Abramson, executive editor at the NYT.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied.”

And the holes proliferate. Carr touches on several reasons why the NY Times’s claims — bolstered by Mandiant, which sees China as a “go-to culprit” (Carr’s words) — don’t stand up to critical analysis. Examples:

The Beijing Workday Argument. The hackers could have been from anywhere in the world. The timezone that Mandiant imagines as a Beijing workday could easily apply to a workday in Bangkok, Singapore, Taiwan, Tibet, Seoul, and even Tallinn – all of whom have active hacker populations.

The Lanxiang Vocational School Argument. The article mentioned that the hackers were traced back to the “same universities used by the Chinese military to attack U.S. military contractors in the past.” If memory serves, one of those was the Lanxiang Vocational School in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province and home to a PLA regional command center. Actually, Jinan is an industrial city of six million people and more than a dozen universities. IP Geolocation to one school means absolutely nothing.

Furthermore, even if the Chinese government was involved in cyber espionage against the New York Times, it wouldn’t use its military for that. It would use its Ministry of State Security (China’s equivalent of the CIA). And they wouldn’t be stupid enough to run the attack from their own offices, which if you’re interested in checking IP addresses, is in Beijing – 274 miles from Jinan.

Again, this doesn’t mean that China is definitely not hacking. Rather, our perspective is skewed. Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t “Who did it?” but rather “Who benefits?” So far, it appears to be US policymakers bent on beefing up cyber-security legislation using China as the go-to bogeyman. Naturally, lots of media have fallen in step, regurgitating a tired, not-at-all subtle narrative that we should know better than to accept at face value.

John Artman has been China-watching and covering tech since 2010. Follow him @KnowsNothing.

Mandiant identified “Unit 61398” as a headquarters of sorts for Shanghai-based hacking outfit APT1, and traced it to a 12-story building in Pudong district.

Are they right?

Judging by Chinese security’s reaction, the answer is probably. In the below video, watch as officers, like T-1000s, chase after a CNN crew trying to make their getaway in a car. “Keep driving, drive away, drive away,” one of the voices in the car says. Another adds, very annoyed, “Drive away.”

“They said it was a military installation of some kind,” reporter David McKenzie explains.

The Brits are having a tough time, too. According to BBC, reporter “John Sudworth went along to investigate but was stopped and briefly detained.” See above for more info on that.

Imagine: authorities don’t want foreigners snooping around their military buildings.

Meanwhile, China has hit back, claiming the US is the bigger hacker. According to the Chinese Ministry of Defense (brought to us by Atlantic Wire):

China is one of the main victims of cyber attacks. According to statistics, the Chinese armed forces access to the Internet user terminal suffered a large number of foreign attacks, [and] according to the IP address of the display, a considerable number of attack sources from the United States, but we did not [use this] a pretext to accuse the U.S. side.

It’s probably true, by the way, that people everywhere are hacking the hell out of one another.

Also, this, translated by CNN:

“There is still no internationally clear, unified definition of what constitutes a hacking attack,” Geng said. “There is no legal evidence behind the report subjectively concluding that the everyday gathering of online information is online spying.”

Which, again, is true. We all agree that in a perfect world, spying on someone, either in the real or virtual world, is bad and no one should ever do it. But in this real world, companies and governments are constantly gathering information on one another all the time. This is the environment we live in, that we’ve willfully, in many ways, surrendered ourselves to: a closely integrated world with interlacing, overlapping networks, a widened public sphere, and evolving, expanding boundaries of privacy. The best defense is offense. Everyone is being hacked, so maybe, in a way, no one is.

Although we readily admit this: it completely and totally sucks to lose information, especially to a competitor. People have every reason to be upset, as long as they don’t get hypocritical about it.

(H/T Alicia)

On the heels of Mandiant’s eye-opening report on alleged Chinese hacking under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, Facebook and Apple have said they too — like literally everyone else — have been “hacked.”

Some Apple employees reportedly dipped their fingers into cyber traps designed to infect their computers with malicious software. “The same software, which infected Macs by exploiting a flaw in a version of Oracle Corp’s Java software used as a plug-in on Web browsers, was used to launch attacks against Facebook, which the social network disclosed on Friday,” according to Reuters.

No one is safe, apparently:

Charlie Miller, a prominent expert on Apple security who is co-author of the Mac Hacker’s Handbook, said the attacks show that criminal hackers are investing more time studying the Mac OS X operating system so they can attack Apple computers.

For example, he noted, hackers recently figured out a fairly sophisticated way to attack Macs by exploiting a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc’s Flash software.

“The only thing that was making it safe before is that nobody bothered to attack it. That goes away if somebody bothers to attack it,” Miller said.

Like Ra’s al Ghul seeking to deliver a microwave bomb into Gotham’s water main, hackers apparently wanted to deliver their treachery to a wellspring so that all of our digital lives become shrouded in paranoia.

Security firm F-Secure wrote that the attackers might have been trying to get access to the code for apps on smartphones, seeking a way to infect millions of end-users. It urged developers to check their source code for unintended changes.

Facebook said a few things too. Gee, who will protect our private information — sarcasm alert — if not Facebook?

All told — as was the case with media organizations who reported they were hacked — no information was reported missing. What gives? What are they setting up? There was a time — those long lost days of yore — when being hacked was a horrible, infuriating thing, because it meant lost passcodes and credit card numbers, or slower processer speeds and more pop-up ads, i.e. living the rest of your cyber life with the computer equivalent of syphilis. In our newer digital age, perhaps there should be a more subtle word for the type aggressive phishing that’s happening? If Inuits can have more than a couple of words for “snow,” we ought to have at least a few for “hacking,” right? Something to think about.

Exclusive: Apple, Macs hit by hackers who targeted Facebook (Reuters) (Image Xinhua)

The People’s Liberation Army may have been funding a massive group of Chinese hackers since 2006, according to a 74-page report by the US-based security firm Mandiant. Reading like the backpage of a Michael Crichton novel, the report details how a large hacking group, APT1, based in the Pudong district of Shanghai has been responsible for hundreds of cyber attacks in the last seven years.

87 percent of APT1’s hacking victims were based in English-speaking countries, according to the report, and include “development agencies, foreign governments in which English is one of multiple official languages, and multinational conglomerates that primarily conduct their business in English.”

We believe that organizations in all industries related to China’s strategic priorities are potential targets of APT1’s comprehensive cyber espionage campaign. While we have certainly seen the group target some industries more heavily than others (see Figure 13), our  observations confirm that APT1 has targeted at least four of the seven strategic emerging industries that China identified in its 12th Five  Year Plan.

APT1 also has many suspicious structural similarities to a PLA unit. Mandiant believes APT1’s offices are located in a 12-story building fitted out by China Telecom and employs hundreds to thousands of employees, while “PLA Unit 61398 is also located in precisely the same area from which APT1 activity appears to originate.”

For its part, China/PLA has denied the allegations, the Washington Post reports.

The Mandiant report goes into the nitty-gritty of the hacking process, but the takeaway is really this: never, ever open a strange attachment. Ever.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has a new book ready to debut in April, The Digital Age, co-written by Jared Cohen, formerly of the State Department. As the Wall Street Journal puts it succinctly, the book is clear about one thing: “China is the most dangerous superpower on Earth.”

Specifically, Schmidt writes that China’s hacking culture — New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Washington Post have all recently fallen victim — will give it a strategic advantage:

“The disparity between American and Chinese firms and their tactics will put both the government and the companies of the United States as a distinct disadvantage,” because “the United States will not take the same path of digital corporate espionage, as its laws are much stricter (and better enforced) and because illicit competition violates the American sense of fair play,” they claim.

“This is a difference in values as much as a legal one.”

The book says the US’s hands aren’t exactly clean:

The U.S. is far from an angel, the book acknowledges. From high-profile cases of cyber-espionage such as the Stuxnet virus that targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, to exports of surveillance software and technology to states with bad human rights records, there is plenty at home to criticize.

But they’re not engaged in the same scale of corporate (and media) espionage. Should they be? Here’s the controversial part:

In this roundabout way the pair come close, on occasion, to suggesting western governments follow China’s lead and form closer relationships between state policy and corporate activity.

Take the equipment and software that comprises the Internet. Most of the world’s IT systems were once based almost entirely on Western infrastructure, but as Chinese firms get more competitive, that is changing, and not necessarily for the better, they say.

The authors probably won’t find a more vociferous critic than WSJ itself: one editor, in a rather breathlessly written editorial, recently stated, “The Middle Kingdom might once have been the center of human civilization. But in the digital world, the Chinese are the barbarians at the gate.”

And then you remember that all non-Romans, to Rome, were “barbarians.” We know how that story turned out.

Exclusive: Eric Schmidt Unloads on China in New Book (WSJ, image Wired)

The Wall Street Journal said Thursday that its computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers for the apparent purpose of monitoring the newspaper’s China coverage.

If you’re not being hacked and monitored by the Chinese, you’re just not important enough. Somewhere, NBC News sheds a tear.

Paula Keve, chief spokeswoman for the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones & Co., said in a written statement: “Evidence shows that infiltration efforts target the monitoring of the Journal’s coverage of China, and are not an attempt to gain commercial advantage or to misappropriate customer information.”

…Ms. Keve called the infiltration of networks related to coverage of China an “ongoing issue,” adding, “we continue to work closely with the authorities and outside security specialists, taking extensive measures to protect our customers, employees, journalists and sources.”

If you have a WSJ login and password, now might be a good time to change in.

Chinese Hackers Targeted Wall Street Journal Computers (WSJ)

Chinese hackers, possibly using phishing software, reportedly broke into the New York Times’s computer network four months ago and installed malware that enabled them to access the personal computers of 53 employees. All indications are that the attack is a response to the paper’s investigation, led by Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza, into premier Wen Jiabao’s family fortunes. The NY Times says its computers were compromised as far back as September 13, just as they were wrapping up reporting for the Wen piece, which was published on October 25.

The concern here should not be for the New York Times, which had nothing stolen and no one harmed (and whose employees, frankly, should know better than to get phished). Near the middle of the NY Times’s four-page article, this:

What they appeared to be looking for were the names of people who might have provided information to Mr. Barboza.

Like a vindictive gangster, they were after informants. Chinese agents were after Chinese sources who could then be punished, since — like cops — the NY Times’s reporters are off limits. What we have is a high-level government equivalent of the street code “snitches get stitches.” Does anyone still wonder why journalists here are so rarely privy to leaked information from inside Zhongnanhai, China’s central government compound?

Thankfully, it appears that the New York Times used no anonymous sources for their Wen story:

Mr. Barboza’s research on the stories, as reported previously in The Times, was based on public records, including thousands of corporate documents through China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce. Those documents — which are available to lawyers and consulting firms for a nominal fee — were used to trace the business interests of relatives of Mr. Wen.

But this case vividly illustrates the difficulty of doing investigative reporting here. Journalists, like beat-level cops in American urban areas, seem woefully ill-equipped to protect their sources, who bear too much risk.

Also, this bit can’t be very comforting:

“They could have wreaked havoc on our systems,” said Marc Frons, the Times’s chief information officer. “But that was not what they were after.”

The attack came after the government issued ominous warnings:

After The Times learned of warnings from Chinese government officials that its investigation of the wealth of Mr. Wen’s relatives would “have consequences”…

Consequences. Think Bobby Baccalieri of The Sopranos walking into a bar, taking two shots of Wild Turkey, and pointing to his head to indicate where a bullet goes.

You can’t accuse the Chinese of not knowing gamesmanship, a bit of tit for tat — you investigate our leader, we’ll spy on yours. You hurt his family, we’ll hurt yours.

The glaring difference, of course, is Wen Jiabao is one of the most powerful people in a country of 1.4 billion. Someone should probably hold him accountable, right? You disagree, Central Politburo?

For the record, China denies it hacked the New York Times.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months (NY Times)

China Digital Times has noticed something very strange happening on Twitter: several high-profile China watchers have reported receiving warnings about attacks on their accounts. Which shadowy cyber prankster would dare try such a thing? Or is this the work of a more sinister agent of the People’s Republic branch of Anonymous?

It seems wrong to target such a small community of like-minded people, and all at once, on such a sensitive day. What is our saboteur seeking to accomplish, denying China watchers, already near-comatose after Hu Jintao’s 100-some-minute speech this morning, their little corner in the buried-behind-the-great-firewall comedy club?

Meanwhile, we eagerly await to see what treasure trove of private tweets has been sitting in Patrick Chovanec‘s account, and revelations that China Media Project practices cabalistic dark arts, and pictures of dead animals via Christina Larson, and Ray Kwong carry on a conversation with a sunset, and Adam Minter tweet, over and over with differing numbers of equal signs: ====D

I will say one thing though: BJC’s account has not been hacked… and that seems like an oversight.

Test: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, Tits.

— Beijing Creamさん (@beijingcream) 2012年11月8日

Confession time: I’m petrified of Anonymous. As someone who is hopelessly clumsy when it comes to web hosting and IT, I know how easy it can be for an experienced hacker to ruin my day.

But then again, I have nothing to hide. I — unlike Fang Binxing — did not engineer a “Great Firewall” for the express purpose of making lives difficult (I remind you here that Fang Binxing is “not a walking heap of gelatinous shit”). I — unlike Fang Binxing — do not boast about having six VPNs (I only have one, Witopia), and say, “But I only try them to test which side wins: the GFW or the VPN.” I — unlike some — am happy to speak out against censorship. And I somewhat fashion myself a man of the people, assuming “people” aren’t offended by the word “shit.” Therefore, I think — if Anonymous really is serious about continuing its inroads onto Chinese turf — that at least I’m safe. As for some other people on Chinese Internet…

We don’t know what to make of Anonymous’s plan to “take down the Great Firewall,” or its threats against Chinese government websites, but they certainly have clout — and more than enough credibility to at least draw Reuters’s attention, which reported yesterday:

The activist hacker group Anonymous plans to launch further attacks on Chinese government websites in a bid to uncover corruption and lobby for human rights, a member of the group said on Monday….

“First we want to alert the Chinese government that we aren’t afraid, and we are going to show the truth and fight for justice,” Anonymous hacker “f0ws3r” told Reuters.

I imagine this could be the government’s worst nightmare. It’s easy, relatively speaking, to deal with businesses and other governments: you just send a stern memo to the regional chamber of commerce or have one of your diplomats refuse to smile in the direction of one of their diplomats. But this new game has different rules, which I can only guess is a lack of rules. How do you negotiate with someone who operates from the shadows, is uninterested in diplomacy and undeterred by your lawyers?

The answer is to have a better offense, I think. The hacker known as fows3r might not have any fear, but I wonder if he’s as committed to his attack as his enemies are to their defense — and counterattack, we can only assume. Because China has an army of hackers, too, and judging by what we hear in the media, they’re also pretty damn good at what they do.

None of this will play out in the open, so we’ll just have to wait and see what gets selectively leaked. Storylines abound, that’s for sure.

Oh, and if you’re from Anonymous China, please get in touch. I have questions.