A Look Into the Chinese Hacker Underworld

beachels416 writes "The NY Times gained access to a Chinese hacker-for-profit, referred to as 'Majia,' and observed him during one of his nightly 'sessions.' From the article: 'Oddly, Majia said his parents did not know that he was hacking at night [hacking is illegal in China]. But at one point, he explained the intricacies of computer hacking and stealing data while his mother stood nearby, listening silently, while offering a guest oranges and candy.' At another point Majia spoke about the recent Google attacks, and claimed to have particular knowledge of the exact vector used. Nothing too new, but an interesting read nevertheless."

Re:Lots of content

[timeOday]

Actually, even your negative synopsis of the piece flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which is that attacks of Chinese origin are all a carefully orchestrated by the ruthless and scheming Chinese government to displace America from its "rightful" place of world dominance. So, yeah, the idea that a lot of it might just be petty white-collar criminals who live with their moms is quite a different phenomenon.

But, They watched him work!

[VortexCortex]

...he showed how he hacked into the Web site of a Chinese company. Once the Web site popped up on his screen, he created additional pages and typed the word “hacked” onto one of them.

Perhaps the journalist had no idea how web browsers work...

Perhaps the "hacker" just pressed Ctrl+T then typed:
javascript:document.write('<h1>HACKED</H1>');
into the address bar...(try it)

Point being: The journalist didn't describe "Majia" doing anything that I would consider cracking... From the description given, Majia could have just been updating his own blog.

You can add the word "Hacked" to the top of almost any web page (incuding this one) by pasting this into your address bar:
javascript:b=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];b.insertBefore(document.createTextNode('Hacked!'),b.firstChild);void(0);

Does that make you a hacker?
To a NYT Journalist, yes.

Re:I don't get it

[Xaedalus]

But that's just it. That's all they're doing: infecting computer, stealing passwords, etc. If you're telling me that there's hundreds of thousands of guys like this just in China alone doing this, then where are the small armies? Where's the hacker mafias? Why aren't they branching out and taking on organized crime? If they are such deviant evil bastards, then where are the results? I don't think there are any. I think we're making these guys to be more badass than they actually are, and buying their lines that they "make mad money". I don't think they are. I think they're getting by on chump change.

Being a gamer makes you a hacker?

[Crazy Taco]

According to the article:

And with 380 million Web users in China and a sizzling online gaming market, analysts say it is no wonder Chinese youths are so skilled at hacking.

Umm, I attended a major US university and got degrees in computer engineering and computer science. During my senior year, I lived on a dorm floor that was the home of the "computer science learning community", basically where many of the new freshman CS majors elected to live. All of them, every single one, was a gamer, and many were of the stereotypical Dungeons and Dragons, renaissance festival attending, medieval replica weapon carrying, nonbathing comp sci niche. They got into comp sci because they were nerds with very strong interests in gaming, and quickly found out that comp sci was about math and programming, not slacking off playing games. Not one of them it to their sophomore year in computer science (not that no freshman made it, but none of the ones in the learning community did).

I'm sorry NYT, but you are wrong yet again. Having a bunch of gamers does not mean you have a bunch of hackers. In fact, it probably has an inverse correlation, because those who take the time to really master games like WoW, collecting every item and reaching every level, typically don't have the time to become an expert in how computers actually work. No wonder the NYT is going bankrupt... this is about the same level of accuracy we see in their political and economic stories as well.