Posted on 06/11/2008 12:34:17 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (AP) - Two House members said Wednesday their Capitol Hill computers, containing information about political dissidents from around the world, have been hacked by sources apparently working out of China. Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf says four of his computers were hacked. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith says two of his computers were compromised in December 2006 and March 2007.
The two lawmakers are longtime critics of China's record on human rights.
In an interview Wednesday, Wolf said the hacking of computers in his Capitol Hill office began in August 2006. He says a computer at a House committee office also was hacked, and he suggested others in the House and possibly the Senate could be involved.
The FBI declined to comment.
Wolf said that in his office, the hackers "got everything," including all the casework regarding political dissidents around the world.
In comments to The Associated Press earlier in the day, Wolf suggested the problem probably goes further. "If it's been done in the House, don't you think that they're doing the same thing in the Senate?"
"I think this is very bad because you have the Chinese compromising and gaining access to computers of any number of members of the House and a major committee of the House," Wolf said. "We don't know how many others."
In calling for hearings in both the House and Senate, Wolf said there "probably are members serving in Congress whose computers have been compromised and they may not even know it."
Separately, U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers.
The FBI declined to comment. In Beijing, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no immediate comment. Last week, China denied the accusations regarding Gutierrez's laptop and the alleged effort to hack Commerce Department computers.
Wolf said he has known about the hacking for a long time but was discouraged from discussing it publicly by people inside U.S. government, whom he refused to identify.
"The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue," said Wolf. "Every time I've started to do something I've been told 'You can't do this.' A lot of people have made it very, very difficult."
Wolf plans to introduce a resolution that he says will help ensure protection for all House computers and information systems. In a draft of prepared remarks he planned to deliver on the House floor Wednesday afternoon, Wolf says he is "deeply concerned that Congress is not adequately aware of or protected" from cyber attacks.
"My own suspicion is I was targeted by China because of my long history of speaking out about China's abysmal human rights record," Wolf says in his remarks. He said Congress should hold hearings, specifically the House Intelligence Committee, Armed Services Committee and Government Operations Committee.
Wolf's resolution calls for the chief administrative officer and sergeant at arms of the House, in consultation with the FBI, to alert House members and their staffs to the danger of electronic attacks. He also wants lawmakers to be fully briefed on ways to safeguard official records from electronic security breaches.
Speaking generally in May 2006, Wolf called Chinese spying efforts "frightening" and said it was no secret that the United States is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services.
In this Sept. 20, 2006 file photo, Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va. gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. Wolf said Wednesday, June 11,2 008, the FBI has found that four of his government computers have been hacked by sources working out of China. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson, File)
The FBI declined to comment. In Beijing, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no immediate comment. Last week, China denied the accusations regarding Gutierrez’s laptop and the alleged effort to hack Commerce Department computers.
Wolf said he has known about the hacking for a long time but was discouraged from discussing it publicly by people inside U.S. government, whom he refused to identify.
“The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue,” said Wolf. “Every time I’ve started to do something I’ve been told ‘You can’t do this.’ A lot of people have made it very, very difficult.”
What a bunch of dummies! Sensitive files should never be kept on a computer that has portals to the internet.
The home computer we have that has a portal to the internet unfortunately has an IP address that is within the range used by government computers. We get hacked all the time!
Sensitive data - financial records and favorite recipes - are kept on our other computer, a stand alone.
Good idea to have a computer that can’t connect to the internet.
I have no prolems with security... and connect with all four of my Macs, networked, and open to Mr. Gore's invention. Try and get in! It's on right now!
Not sure why this is news; my firewall gets felt up by the far east just about every day.
All evidence to the contrary.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/27/Gone-in-2-minutes-Mac-gets-hacked-first-in-contest_1.html
“Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organizers using the computers to do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.”
This is funny. Just shows computer security is as good as the idiot driving it. Course without local access to the machine, it seemed pretty secure.
That was a quote from the infoworld link, by the way. :)
chicom bump for later............
What a 1st class imbecile this guy is..
He is known to be anti-Chicom, and and working on Chinese human right issues - AND HE PUTS THAT INFO ON HIS UNSECURED LAPTOP - even though everyone and his mother know the chicoms have been hacking into everthing they think has value???
A lot of good people over in China could die because of this lame-brain..
Please explain what happened. I think I know. If you're interested in a proper explanation, you can scan Swordmaker's files, or just ask him. I just use my computers.
I can leave my Mac on all the time. Unfortunately, viruses are programs, and can only rub if I tell them to do so. Of course, it has to get past a firewall, built into OSX.
Show evidence of something real, in the wild, that can actually penetrate my native security, and not something from somebody trying to sell anti-whatever software!
I'll buy you a bottle of your choice if you can prove the ability to spy on my computer exists. Take over my computer, and I'll buy you a case!
I hear there’s a backdoor if you’re watching the “China Syndrome” on a Mac.
I wouldn’t taunt them if I were you.
Smith & Wesson may limit your access...
I really really hope they told the media their computers were hacked because the computers contained fake info they wanted the Chinese to have. Otherwise, they just let the Chi-coms know that they got what they were looking for.
That is not evidence of a widespread problem.
Charlie Miller, the hacker who won the contest by getting into user level access on the MacBook Air, is an ex-NSA computer security expert. He stated that he and his team of two other ex-NSA computer experts had worked for three weeks on their hack of the Mac in preparation for the contest. The two minutes was merely the time necessary to connect the MacBook Air to their computer and have the contest referees navigate to their prepared website and download a malicious file to instigate their prepared exploit. Miller also stated that his exploit would have worked on all three of the challenge machines.
The Windows Vista laptop fell six hours later to a team who said they started working on the problem that morning.
None of the machines were hacked on the first day when it was necessary to actually break into the out-of-the-box computers without user assistance.
Incidentally, the vulnerability in Safari and Java (a third-party application) that Miller used to access the MacBook Air was closed less than two weeks after it was reported to Apple.
Actual evidence of the Mac's greater security is shown by the US Army announcement that they were deploying more Macs because of the Macs' greater security.
PS, nobody won the Linux machine.
Contrary to some claims, that's false—neither have been seen in the wild. They exist only in Security company labs as proofs of concepts.
Inqtana.A was an attempt at a Bluetooth exploit that required the target user to accept a download from an unknown Bluetooth source (someone within 30 feet) and then install and run the file. It was intended to then copy itself to any executable files present in the same directory (ignoring OS X's system prohibition against any application modifying files in the same folder). It was a failed attempt at making an OS X worm. Symantec says:
"OSX.Inqtana.A is a proof-of-concept worm that runs on Macintosh OS X and spreads by exploiting a the Apple Mac OS X BlueTooth Directory Traversal Vulnerability (as described in Bugtraq ID 13491)."
Incidentally, Inqtana.A used a vulnerability that had been closed by Apple over one year before Inqtana's author sent copies of his work to various security companies.
Leap.A (also named Oompa-Loompa.A) is a proof-of-concept worm that was intended to infect OS X computers over the Bonjour local area networking capabilities of the Mac using the iChat instant messaging function. Fortunately, it also did not work. When copies of it were sent to Secunia, they brought together two of their security engineers, two Mac software engineers, and couple of Mac specialists from Macworld. It took these experts over six hours to merely get it to copy itself from one Mac to another... and then it required the assistance of the targeted user. When they finally got it to the target Mac, it failed to work. Symantec reports that the number of infections in the wild was 0 - 49. That is only true because it includes the number ZERO.
Both of these POC "viruses" were essentially two day wonders in the computer punditry that were laughed out of town as very poor efforts.
By-the-way, you missed Macarena, another proof-of-concept... that simply did not work as intended. In fact, the author imbedded the comment "So little code, so many problems," which is interpreted to mean that he had a lot of difficulty getting it to do what he intended.
You also missed OS X.Renepo or OSX.Opener, purported to be an OS X root kit. It is merely a UNIX script file. It can only impact someone who installs it who has activated Root. it cannot self-replicate or self-transmit, and requires an administrator password to be installed. At best it could be called a Trojan Horse malware.
Another one is the OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan horse that masquerades as a video codec, found last October. This one IS in the wild... but it really requires industrial strength stupidity to get invaded by it and it is very easy to remove. It is found only on porn sites that required the download of a video Codec to view certain porn movies... but the OS halts the download and announces that the files being downloaded contain an executable application. It then requires the user to install it, providing an administrator password, and then requires the user to OK the execution of a downloaded application for the first time. The OS gives the user every opportunity to stop and think.
Then there was the Pirate Office for Mac Trojan that "infected" exactly one user (at least one who admitted to it). This was merely a 10 KILO byte Applescript file that purported itself to be a pirated copy of Microsoft Office for Mac 2004, an application that weighed in at around 230 MEGA bytes. The idiot who got infected installed this ten K file and was shocked when it erased his home directory when he clicked on it.
Have I missed any?
Oh, yeah, I have. I forgot OSX_MACSWEEP.A. The OS X FUD spreaders were so desperate for bad news to smear OS X with that they started yelling "Malware! Malware! Malware!" about a commercial product that could be at best termed "Scareware." They even gave it a "Virus" name, OSX_MACSWEEP.A, to make it more scary in the stories they wrote about it. MacSweeper is a product that advertises itself to new Mac users, preying on their Windows induced fears and past Windows experiences, as a utility that will "clean up" their Macs of "unwanted" files—files such as cache files, cookies, and temporary files—and "Defrag" the Mac's hard drive. These are things that OS X does by itself in the background. If a user downloaded a "trial version" of Macsweeper and ran it, it would find "malicious applications" (little used Apple utilities and applications) and "spyware," (the cache files and cookies) and pop up an add telling the user that the only way they could get rid of this "infection" was to purchase the full version of Macsweeper for $39.95.
David Howe, an analyst at Blackfriar's Communications, put it this way:
". . . I think it's important to distinguish between having two exploits on the roughly 50 million Mac OS X computers (the latest of which is actually a Trojan Horse, and not a virus) and the roughly 140,000 viruses extant for the hundreds of millions of Microsoft Windows computers worldwide. Two vulnerabilities don't make an epidemic. And given that Mac OS X is a harder target to penetrate, I don't expect those ratios to change dramatically any time soon."
(I think Howe's "50 Million" is a tad exaggerated. I believe the latest statistics put the number of OS X Macs at around 35,000,000.)
With physical access, like other platforms including Windows and Linux, I can gain access to your files with nothing more than a Mac OS installation disk. No password required.
While you can reset the administrator password on an unprotected OS X system with an OS X install disk, that won't work on a machine that has a Firmware Password set. You can't start up from a DVD or CD without the pass phrase, nor can you start it up in Target Disk mode. Even without the firmware protection set, you cannot get access to my files as they are protected with Filevault and have AES-128 bit encryption.
I can also put my really sensitive data into a disk image. That allows me to use AES-256 bit encryption.
for later read
Linux Ignored, Not Immune, Says Hacker Contest Sponsor
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9074102
"It was actually a lack of interest" on the part of the PWN to OWN contestants, Forslof said. "Shane Macaulay's exploit would have worked on Linux. He could have knocked it over. But the contestants get a lot more mileage out of attacks on the Mac or Windows," she continued.
They will feed hacker/cracker info to the Cyber Warfare Center at Barksdale,AFB,,,Soon...;0)
No, Texas, it i had to hold an objective discussion with people who post myth as fact. You stated that Leap.A and Inqtana.A were Mac OS X viruses that had been seen in the wild. I merely provided the facts about ALL of the OS X so-called malware. That's just SEVEN malware candidates in over seven years of OSX's being in the wild—and only two absurd malware actually being found in the wild. Compare that to the over 300,000 in the wild malware that has been inflicted on Windows. Relatively, Texas, the Mac is secure, exceedingly secure, when compared to Windows. That is being objective... not your claims of objectivity based on a lack of experience with the platform you are disparaging.
Your very first sentence is an ad hominem attack on me, although I wrote nothing that was not factual, where YOU have. You then insult me by implying that I am like a liberal, blind to my faults. You then call my expert and experienced opinion of the security of OS X "laughable" based on your total lack of experience and expertise on the platform. You then add a non sequitur about market share that has nothing to do with the relative security of the Mac. That is hardly trying to hold an "objective discussion."
Firmware passwords also protect computers other than Macs.
Did I say anywhere in my post that Firmware passwords don't protect other computers? You on the other hand made a sweeping indictment of Macs by claiming you could get into one by just being able to use the install CD (actually, its a DVD). I merely pointed out that it is completely possible to really nail down the data on a Mac so that no one can get to it in a reasonable time.
. . . false confidence . . .
When the Mac is being attacked by REAL self replicating, self transmitting viruses in the wild, not your failed experimental, proof-of-concept viruses, perhaps, then my confidence in the security of this product might be considered "false," but that has not happened yet. When it does, then I will consider what steps are necessary to protect this machine beyond what it is already capable of, out-of-the-box.
Shhhh. I know. Nobody wanted it.
;^)>
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