The Chinese Information War by Dennis F. Poindexter

Author:Dennis F. Poindexter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Living in Bad Neighborhoods

When the Internet started to replace television, we probably should have noticed that it was doing more than that. It was changing the way we interact with each other and, among other things, bringing in people who lived in bad neighborhoods. The Chinese are only some of them, but they are the majority of the new people on the Internet. They don’t know how to act, but we are learning that the hard way.

The Internet is usually thought of as a neutral place, not good or bad. This is a myth, one that started with a grain of truth, long before the Internet came to be. Before we saw the first mention of the Internet, it was possible to roam around on the computer networks of that day and probably not run into anyone, or anything, that would cause a person grief. It was like a neighborhood where you could leave your doors open at night and people might even come in and walk around the house, but they never took anything or made a mess. There was a kind of strange relationship between the people who owned computers and the people who used them. Mostly, computers were used for good, or from the business side of things, for productivity. Everybody liked that and they felt better about sharing this good for everyone.

By the late ’60s, the people who were coming in and walking around started to take things that didn’t belong to them. It didn’t happen often, but people who operated computers thought it happened often enough that they needed to stop letting everyone in, and started to think about protecting information from anyone who might try to get at it. Some of them were saying “there goes the neighborhood” kinds of things to justify cutting the systems off from each other. Business systems were just connecting to each other for business, but people in those businesses were stealing from each other. A few of them were professional criminals trying to blend in, but not very many. Most of the time, they were just opportunists.

One guy who knew how to program a bank’s computers invented a scheme that was pretty clever. He thought that he could slice off a piece of every bank transaction and he could make the piece small enough that nobody would notice. They called that the “salami technique” to make it sound less complicated, but it is not all that easy to do. Still, the money piled up pretty fast, and he got caught, and accounting programs started to round off numbers to eight decimal places—just in case someone tried it again.

Another couple of guys found out that you could go downstairs in an airport and when people upstairs used their American Express to buy checks they could later cash, they could record the electrons that made that happen and play it back to get more of those checks. You don’t see those in airports anymore. That is a “playback attack,” and we still have some of those around.

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