Soob

The Washington Post has an article on some group that is waging cyberwar against Pro-Tibetan non-state actors (via this link filled bonanza on metafilter). Quotes from the article:

"Experts say attributing such attacks to any one group or government is extremely difficult, as computer systems that appear to be the source of malicious activity online often are controlled by persons or groups using computers in completely different locations. But Reynolds said these types of sustained, targeted attacks suggest a level of organization, tenacity and degree of commitment not typically seen in attacks by individual hackers.

"They're really trying to disrupt the Tibetan movement, and whoever is perpetrating this is doing it on full-time basis," she said.

A handful of recent targeted attacks shared the same Internet resources and tactics in common with those used in a spate of digital assaults against number of major U.S. defense contractors, said Maarten Van Horenbeeck, an incident handler with the SANS Internet Storm Center, Bethesda, Md.-based organization that tracks online security trends."

Towards the end of the article it says the attacks aren't that successful.

Slashdot also has the story on the cyberattacks which featured a comment stating the following:

"Chinese communist sympathizers have been engaging in a fair bit of historical revisionism and propaganda on the internet about these incidents. Check out the wikipedia article for instance, where CCP communist shills in the diaspora have been edit-warring in gangs to make the Tibetans look like the bad guys."

So I wandered over to the wikipedia page on Tibetan unrest to have a look around. It'd be nice when commentators made such claims they'd link to the edits they are talking about, but as we'll see in a paragraph, the /. commentator may not be all that he seems. I had a quick glance over the discussion page and it looks much like any discussion page on controversial subjects within Wikipedia. There was nothing about "communist shills" and edit wars involving groups. The only edit war mentioned on the discussion page was between two individuals who even own up to it. The history of the page is also flooded with recent edits. Considering it is real-time news, it would take an immense amount of time for me to go through, compare edits, users, IP addresses and so on to discern any sort of pattern suggesting, or discounting, the hypothesis of RED CHINA INFO OPS (sorry I just had to do that, I've always wanted to be a conspiracy nut who writes in big coloured letters).

The same /. commentator from above also linked to yet another dodgy article about Covert Action and Tibet which claims some absolute whoppers about GCHQ - the British Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) agency. The article is from phayul.com which is a pro-Tibetan website, which makes me think the commentator led me on a wild little goose chase.

A valuable lesson: Propaganda goes both ways.

Some of these fantasies contained within the article include GCHQ analysts using human sources, from the Dalai Lama no less, as corroborative evidence. Also, according to the writer, satellite imagery is collected by GCHQ and processed by analysts within GCHQ. JARIC, the British imagery intelligence group, should just close up shop because it looks like GCHQ SIGINT analysts are doing all the work for them according to this story. The author also goes into the technical capabilities of the birds. The imagery is so good it apparently can differentiate between agent provocateurs and real protestors. It must be like those satellites off that Will Smith movie 'Enemy of the State' that can see around corners. I shouldn't have been surprised when I reached the end of the article where it stated the writer had recently authored a book on CIA mind control.

Two crackpot articles in a week, can we get a third?