4-6-19 In his annual letter to shareholders, distributed last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took aim at socialism, warning it would be “a disaster for our country,” because it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse.”
Dimon should know. He was at the helm when JPMorgan received a $25bn socialist-like bailout in 2008, after it and other Wall Street banks almost tanked because of their reckless loans.
Dimon subsequently agreed to pay the government $13bn to settle charges that the bank overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors in the run-up to the crisis. According to the Justice Department, JPMorgan acknowledged it had regularly and knowingly sold mortgages that should have never been sold. (Presumably this is where the “stagnation, corruption and often worse” comes in.)
The $13bn penalty was chicken feed to the biggest bank on Wall Street, whose profits last year alone amounted to $35bn. Besides, JPMorgan was able to deduct around $11bn of the settlement costs from its taxable income. https://www.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-loves-socialism-bankers-142834258.html
Harbin ice sculpture
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1-10-19 Many thought the internet would bring democracy to China. Instead it has empowered government surveillance and control beyond Mao Zedong’s dreams. Now the censors are turning their attention to the rest of the world. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612638/when-chinese-hackers-declared-war-on-the-rest-of-us/
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12.20.18 “More than 90 percent of DOJ’s cases alleging economic espionage over the past seven years involve China,” said deputy attorney-general Rod Rosenstein at a press conference detailing the indictment. “More than two-thirds of the department’s cases involving thefts of trade secrets are connected to China.” https://www.wired.com/story/doj-indictment-chinese-hackers-apt10/
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3-6-19 “There is nothing like it,” Wray said. “I’m not somebody who is prone to hyperbole, but of all the things that surprised me when I came back into this world the thing that most shocked me was the breadth, the depth, the scale of the Chinese counterintelligence threat.”…
A lot of China’s hacking involves exploiting very simple vulnerabilities that companies could protect against but don’t – either because they don’t understand their digital weaknesses or haven’t made cybersecurity a priority.
Krebs spent a lot of time at RSA urging cybersecurity industry pros to help companies do the simple security work to make Chinese hacking more difficult. “The majority of the times they’re getting in, its just basic, basic stuff,” he said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2019/03/06/the-cybersecurity-202-u-s-officials-it-s-china-hacking-that-keeps-us-up-at-night/5c7ec07f1b326b2d177d5fd3/?utm_term=.5493821dce0b
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U.S. officials say China's targets include the fields of aerospace, biotechnology, telecommunications, medical equipment and oil and gas exploration. Those match the business sectors tabbed for strategic development in China's official government policy called "Made in China 2025.”…
Goldsmith says the indictments not only have failed to deter China from further hacking, they may even send a signal of weakness because so few of those who have been charged actually are prosecuted….
John Carlin, who led the Justice Department's National Security Division: ”If we're going to change this behavior, it has to be part of a larger strategy of raising the cost and includes all of the instruments of U.S. power, including the power to sanction under the Treasury Department," he said.
To date however the Treasury Dept. has not used that power against China over its industrial cyber-espionage. https://www.npr.org/2019/02/05/691403968/charges-against-chinese-hackers-are-now-common-why-dont-they-deter-cyberattacks
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2-18-19 The Iranian attacks coincide with a renewed Chinese offensive geared toward stealing trade and military secrets from American military contractors and technology companies, according to nine intelligence officials, private security researchers and lawyers familiar with the attacks who discussed them on condition of anonymity….
Mr. Segal, director of CFR cyberspace program, and other Chinese security experts said attacks that once would have been conducted by hackers in China’s People’s Liberation Army are now being run by China’s Ministry of State Security. These hackers are better at covering their tracks. Rather than going at targets directly, they have used a side door of sorts by breaking into the networks of the targets’ suppliers. They have also avoided using malware commonly attributed to China, relying instead on encrypting traffic, erasing server logs and other obfuscation tactics….
Many of the attacks by the Chinese Ministry of State Security have been against strategic targets like internet service providers with access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of corporate and government networks.
Last week, Ms. Moriuchi, who is now a threat director at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, released a report on a yearlong, stealth campaign by the MSS to hack internet service providers in Western Europe and the United States and their customers….
The current hacks are harder to catch than previous Iranian attacks. Instead of hitting victims directly, FireEye researchers said, Iranian hackers have been going after the internet’s core routing system, intercepting traffic between so-called domain name registrars. Once they intercepted their target’s customer web traffic, they used stolen login credentials to gain access to their victims’ emails. (Domain name registrars hold the keys to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies’ websites.)
“They’re taking whole mailboxes of data,” said Benjamin Read, a senior manager of cyberespionage analysis at FireEye. Mr. Read said Iranian hackers had targeted police forces, intelligence agencies and foreign ministries, indicating a classic, state-backed espionage campaign rather than a criminal, profit-seeking motive. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/technology/hackers-chinese-iran-usa.html.
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