For the last few weeks many articles and news stories were published about the Chinese hacking USA government computers. The reality is that the Chinese have been hacking the US, Russian, Australian (,etc) computers for years, but they are not the only to blame, since the US, Russia and all other countries have been doing the same for a long time.
Why this is news stories now? Richard Bejtlich pointed that it might be for political reasons, but why would a country let the enemy know that they succeeded? Even worse, why would the US air force publish in their own site that the Chinese is the leader in cyber warfare?
That might be a reason… one of the things that I learned from history is that governments use “desinformation warfare” to achieve their goals. My take is that the US gov (and intelligence agencies) setup some honeypots with fake information for the Chinese to hack. The Chinese were successful and now the US gov wants the Chinese to believe that they hacked real information… What’s the best way to make them believe so? Yes, tell the whole world about it..
*Yes, this is not news anymore, but I am still catching up on my reads.
**Sorry for off-topic, back to ossec from now on 🙂