The Beijing hack attack

[maggie knowles <maggie@vgn.com>]

[: hacktivism :]

hello hacktivists!  hopefully the following article is not a repeat!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date:  Thu, 16 Dec 1999 13:59:53 +0000
From: "NewsHawk Inc." <<hawkeye@saber.net>
Reply-To: hawkeye@saber.net
Organization: NewsHawk Inc.
Subject: Awesome, Effective Geek Attack On Red China
To: unlisted-recipients:; (no To-header on input)

12.16.99
Awesome, Effective Geek Attack On Red China
We were forwarded the article below by respondent Bruce Chesley.
NewsHawk® Inc.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Subject: 
WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS
The Beijing hack attack 
Hong Kong-based cyber warriors build anti-China techno army
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com


Editor's Note:  Computer hacking - once the shadowy domain of misfits,
pranksters, techno-critics and spies - has taken center stage.  While
Y2K "czar" John Koskinen pleads publicly with hackers to cease and
desist during the century date-change, reports escalate daily of
cyber-terrorism threats and malevolent computer viruses embedded in
e-mail, timed to activate on Jan. 1.

But there is another side to hacking.

WorldNetDaily's roving international correspondent, Anthony C. LoBaido,
while enduring seven weeks of one of Hong Kong's hottest summers on
record, was allowed into the secret realm of one of the world's leading
computer hacking organizations.

>------------------------------------------------------------------------

<Picture>
By Anthony C. LoBaido
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com

HONG KONG -- What do blondes, Jack in the Box tacos and 21st century
cyber-warfare have in common ?  Everything, apparently, if you're one of
the elite and stealthy soldiers in Hong Kong Blondes' computer hacking
universe.

These committed soldiers are locked in mortal combat with the government
of the People's Republic of China and the transnational corporations who
profit from dealing with it.

"Human rights are a global concern and we have no second thoughts about
attacking the multinational corporations who profit off of the human
rights abuses committed against our Chinese brothers and sisters by
their own government," says Databyte Cowgirl, one of the leaders of the
Hong Kong Blondes.

Along with numerous other members of the Hong Kong Blondes, Databyte
Cowgirl was interviewed by WorldNetDaily over the course of seven weeks
in July and August of 1999, as well as during the past several weeks.

"The Chinese government officials are just as bad as the Nazis.  Only,
for some reason, the multinational corporations find China and other
communist regimes around the world to be more politically digestible,"
she added.

"The gross human rights violations of the Chinese leadership, like the
logai gulag system, religious persecution, forced organ harvesting,
abortion and the crackdown on the Falong Gong Tai Chi movement are the
epitome of evil.  The only way we have to fight against them is via the
high-tech realm."

The story of the Hong Kong Blondes is a fascinating, twisted tale,
stranger than fiction.

To begin, the group was formed by the infamous (to the communist Chinese
dictatorship) or renowned (to computer "hackers" the world over) Blondie
Wong.  Although his name is unfamiliar to the general public of both
American and China, Blondie Wong is a man who is well known to the
Chinese government, the People's Liberation Army, the National Security
Agency of the U.S., the CIA, FBI, Interpol and numerous Fortune 500
companies.

Although he now lives in exile in Toronto, Canada, under the protection
of armed bodyguards, as a young boy Blondie Wong saw his beloved father
stoned to death by Chairman Mao's Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution.  Years later he traveled to the United Kingdom, where he
entered university and studied to become a teacher.  In the summer of
1989, after witnessing the Tienanmen Square massacre on television,
Blondie Wong decided to form the Hong Kong Blondes and their sister
hacking group, the Yellow Pages.

At first, Wong started small -- organizing a close circle of friends he
believed he could trust.  Later he launched an international recruiting
campaign aimed at some of the finest computer engineering universities
in America and around the world.

Ranging from Cal Tech to MIT, Blondie Wong assembled an elite army of
sympathetic hackers.  Young men and women who only a few short years
before had been high school geeks with thick glasses and pocket
protectors now became the front line of attack against the communist
Chinese government.

They pledged allegiance to Blondie Wong's crusade against communist
China and turned their collective computer science and engineering
skills into a sharp spear.  Within a few months, this spear was capable
of penetrating the internal affairs of China's military industrial
complex, as well as the Western transnational corporations that do
business with China.

"One of the reasons that human rights in China are not further ahead is
because they have been de-linked from American trade policy," Wong said
in a document released through Cult of the Dead Cow, a U.S.-based hacker
group that has advised the Blondes on technical issues.

"When human rights considerations were associated with doing business
with the United States, at least there was the threat of losing trade
relations, of some form of punishment. Now this just doesn't exist. 
Beijing successfully went around Congress and straight to American
business, so in effect, businessmen started dictating foreign policy,"
Wong explained.

"By taking the side of profit over conscience, business has set our
struggle back so far that they have become our oppressors too," Wong
said.

To deal with their oppressors, the Blondes began reading the private
email of multinational executives and People's Liberation Army
officers.  They downloaded secure information such as satellite access
codes, and even produced forged credentials giving Hong Kong and
mainland colleagues access to People's Liberation Army facilities.

Closer to home in Hong Kong, the Blondes began meeting at a local Jack
in the Box restaurant, where they would munch on tacos while exchanging
customized diagnostic software tools with one another.  These tools were
used to launch attacks against the PLA's computer systems through DoS or
"Denial of Service" - in which a system is overloaded with millions of
"hits" on a website.  Other attack modes include erasing important data,
altering and planting disinformation, and "spoofing" or attacking the
processor of a computer network so as to gain root privileges -- the
ability to execute commands and functions -- within the PLA network.

As time progressed, members of the Hong Kong Blondes leadership told
WorldNetDaily they began actually to install codes within the PLA
computer mainframes.  By using cellular modems, they were able to
monitor the electromagnetic signals emitted by PLA computers by remote
means.  The Blondes even planted transmitters within the offices of the
Chinese government, People's Liberation Army and foreign corporate
headquartersin order to monitor their activities and infiltrate their
computer networks.

For those who doubt Blondie Wong's legions and capabilities, the group,
as if to prove itself, temporarily disabled a key People's Liberation
Army military satellite.  Several PLA military officers questioned by
WorldNetDaily in Hong Kong confirmed this intrusion.

In fact, the Chinese government and military officially recognized the
unauthorized attack on their hardened, restricted systems in a press
release.

"In 1999, there were 228 cyber-attacks launched within Hong Kong, in
1998, there were only 34," said Lo Yik Kee, chief superintendent of the
newly formed Police Computer Crime Bureau, which will start operations
on January 1, 2000.

"We've seen a large increase in hacking incidents and due to the
transnational nature of this kind of activity, it will only increase in
the future."

The Jack in the Box restaurant where the Hong Kong Blondes used to meet
was closed down, putting an end to the group's taco fests.  Yet, the
space was renovated into an Internet café, from which the group first
launched its PLA infiltrations.  Since then, the cyber cafe, which stood
near the TST subway station on Hong Kong Island, has been closed down as
well.  But the hacking unit formed by Blondie Wong continues to grow.

According to China's Ministry of Public Security, there were 72,000
cyber-attacks launched against the PLA on mainland Chinese soil in the
first nine months of this year.  Of those, 165 were admitted to have
been "successful."

A spokesman for the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C. told
WorldNetDaily that there are "less than 1,100 recognized hacking experts
worldwide.  " Blondie Wong and his followers definitely appear to be
included in that number.

"The PLA is about to launch a fourth division of its military," said
Ashton Tyler Baines in a recent interview with WorldNetDaily. A
London-born computer programmer who now lives in the New Territories
north of Kowloon Island in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,
Baines has been a member of the Hong Kong Blondes for the past two
years.

"The PLA wants to control the cyberspace of its enemies, while at the
same time preventing attacks on its own cyberspace," she explained.

Baines told WorldNetDaily that the Hong Kong Blondes and the Yellow
Pages have "already placed over 40 social engineers [computer operators
who act as moles for the Blondes] inside the PLA's newly created
cyberspace division."

"The PLA is in for a rude awakening. We can infiltrate, alter and even
crash several of their networks.  We're putting in backdoors.  We're
writing bad code into the CD-ROMs they use as backups for their off-line
servers.  We have already infected the backup off-site copies of their
CD-ROMs.  We understand most of their security protocols because we
wrote most of them into the software," she added.

As one would expect, the Hong Kong Blondes are a secretive group who
depend totally on the honor of their members.  Yet their leaders told
WorldNetDaily they "encourage other interested parties to form their own
hacking groups."

The Hong Kong Blondes won't disclose the numbers on their membership
roster for two reasons.  Primary, of course, is concern for the security
of their members.  But the Blondes also admit they aren't exactly sure
just how many elite hackers around the world have aligned themselves
with their agenda.

"Ironically, we follow Chairman Mao's dictates of warfare.  We are
organized into small cells which are independent of one another. Cut off
one head of a cell, and another will emerge in its place," said Baines.

"Anyone can join our cyber army.  The goals and objectives are clear and
well known in underground hacking circles.  First, infiltrate the PLA --
their communications satellites, space program and supercomputers, which
can perform billions of operations in a single second.  Second, the
multinational corporations who are feeding the PLA weapons frenzy. 
Third, we like to go after COSCO (the Chinese Overseas Shipping Company)
which is nothing more than a front for the PLA to acquire the financial
muscle it needs to expand and threaten Free Asia and the West."

According to Databyte Cowgirl, the Blondes and the Yellow Pages are also
targeting the financial operations of Ted Turner's CNN and his Atlanta
Braves Baseball team, as well as transnational companies "like Coca-Cola
who do business with the Islamic jihad government of Sudan." She was
referring to the Sudanese "holy war" that has resulted in the deaths of
millions of black South Sudanese Christians since 1983.

Additional targets include AT&T's new Lucent Technologies, which will
handle future "cashless" transactions over the telephone, and the Hong
Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa corporation, the latter with known ties to
the People's Liberation Army.  Hutchison Wampoa is due to take over the
operation of the strategically vital Panama Canal in the year 2000.

"It's high time we began attacking the money the elite has stashed away
by arming the PLA and profiting on the suffering of the Chinese people,"
said Baines.

"Banking, stocks, bonds, IRAs, gold bullion, money transfers, pension
accounts and everything else you can think of.  If the CIA can go after
the bank accounts of (Serbian President) Milosevich, then we can go
after the private bank accounts of China-lovers like Henry Kissinger and
Madeleine Albright.  Kissinger makes millions of dollars every year
speaking and lobbying on behalf of Western multinational engagement with
China.  That's blood money on his hands and we intend to take it back --
so he'd better be hiding his money under his mattress."

Tracey Kinchen, a former M1-5 agent with British Intelligence, assists
the Hong Kong Blondes and the Yellow Pages with acquiring fake travel
credentials and other sensitive items needed for international travel. 
Kinchen brings three qualities to the Hong Kong Blondes which its
members claim are indispensible.  First, she is the group's only natural
blonde.  Second, she is the spitting image of Hollywood actress Julie
Holden.  Third, and most importantly they say, she loves Jack in the Box
tacos.

In an interview with WorldNetDaily conducted at the World Trade Center
in Bangkok, Thailand, Kinchen spelled out the reasons she supports the
Hong Kong Blondes' efforts.

"Blondie Wong and the Hong Kong Blondes would never want to hurt
anyone.  They follow Ghandi's and Martin Luther King's worldview of
non-violence," she told WorldNetDaily.

"But they also understand that the nature of warfare has changed. Who
could have known that the supercomputers the Pentagon only dreamed about
a half century ago would one day become home appliances capable of the
most high-tech industrial espionage?"

Kinchen said that information technology is the "refuge of last resort"
and the "perfect medium to conduct low intensity warfare."

"The NSA's budget is eight times larger than the CIA's.  They handle
most of the intelligence workload.  Yet, with all of their state of the
art equipment they haven't been able to touch Blondie Wong, or any of us
for that matter."

While maintaining strict loyalty to Blondie Wong and his compatriot, the
shadowy Lemon Li who lives in exile in St Nazare, France, the Hong Kong
Blondes and the Yellow Pages are rapidly expanding.

In addition to cells at Cal Tech and MIT, the group has set up new cells
at Baylor, Texas A&M, West Point, Liberty Baptist -- and the Air Force
Academy in Colorado.

"Our movement is a lot like witchcraft in colonial Salem," said Michael
Ming, a Chinese-born computer science student at Texas A&M University in
College Station, Texas.

"Most people assume "The Crucible" version of unjust witch hunts in
Salem is the truth.  But I believe witchcraft was real and powerful in
Salem.  Not because of the witches, but because the general population
believed that it had real power.  As long as the PLA knows we're out
there, we'll be agitating them and taking away their comfort zone."

Ming added, "Now that the NSA, Echelon and PLA understand that we have a
virtually undetectable, un-infiltratable, loose-knit organization with
total allegiance to Blondie Wong and his goals, we're going to become
even more of a threat to them.  Even if they found us and took us out,
thousands would rise up to take our places.  Even the PLA can't kill
that fast."

The Hong Kong Blondes recently presented this WorldNetDaily reporter
with a large mahogany replica of Noah's Ark, complete with 500 animal
and people pieces.  The ark was hewn by persecuted priests who languish
inside the boundaries of mainland China.

This band of anarchists, snoops, humanists, Christians, Buddhists and
blondes, both real and imagined, has united in pursuit of a common goal
-- to "fight the powers that be" by "hacking the planet."



This reporter recently said goodbye to the Hong Kong Blondes'
Thailand-based cell at the "Pam Pam" restaurant in Bangkok's World Trade
Center.  Pam Pam is the innocuous name given to Thailand's newest Jack
in the Box franchise.  The restaurant's menu features every item Jack in
the Box lovers crave, from curly fries to sourdough burgers. 
Conspicuously absent are the tacos.

Yet, hanging on the walls of Pam Pam's restaurant are giant pictures of
the beloved tacos.  And just below those pictures sit a neat row of
state of the art computers, just waiting for the birth of a new Hong
Kong Blondes cell.

Hack the planet.


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