Information Warfare: Tibetan Rebels Give China A Bloody Nose

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January 11, 2014:   Tibetan exiles are fighting back against Chinese Cyber War attacks. This is mainly because China's hackers have become easier to identify as they have been getting cocky and careless. This has made many of their victims more determined to defend themselves from the Chinese attacks because now they know they are being hacked and by who. China has long accused India of supporting the separatists in Tibet. India has hosted Tibetan refugees since the first ones came across in the early 1950s, after China invaded and reconquered Tibet (which had been independent since 1914.)  

Among the more alert victims are the Tibetan exiles running the CTA (Central Tibetan Administration, formerly the Tibetan government in exile) in India where they are working to regain Tibetan independence. The CTA is headquartered in an Indian hill town (Dharamsala) near the Tibetan border. This is the home of the Dali Lama and widely considered the most hacked (mainly by the Chinese) place on the planet. Since the Chinese hacking activity became more known and understood the CTA staff and supporters are now diligently learning how to neutralize or avoid the Chinese hacking.

The Chinese hacking efforts against the CTA were discovered over the last two years as Internet security researchers found identical bits of code (the human readable text that programmers create and then turn into smaller binary code for computers to use) and techniques for using it in hacking software used against Tibetan independence groups and commercial software sold by some firms in China and known to work for the Chinese military. Similar patterns have been found in hacker code left behind during attacks on American military and corporate networks. The best hackers hide their tracks better than this. The Chinese consider the CTA a major threat to their unpopular rule in Tibet and have been reading CTA email and documents for years. Not so much anymore and that annoys the Chinese a great deal.

 

 

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