Napoleon said, “When China awakes the world will tremble”, and China has awoken.
In fact, it has overtaken Italy, gaining the seventh place in the hierarchy of world economic powers and, shortly, it will overtake also France and the United Kingdom with the leap of Peking to fourth place in the world classification of PIL, not too far behind Germany (1) . In light of the continuing increase over the last 10 years, at rates of between 9% and 10%, it is more than likely that by 2040, the Chinese PIL will overtake the American one.
In the face of the new geo-economic panorama, redesigned by the Chinese boom, until now the European countries have found a fragile and partial compactness only in the rearguard battles concerning customs duties. Each country moved on its own accord: London and Paris contracting a considerably large supply of airbuses with Peking, again Paris selling nuclear power stations, and Berlin, high-speed trains.
Italy, in this framework, makes its major efforts, to balance the reciprocal exchange with China, by entrusting the textile and footwear sectors, in the awareness of having a certain stylistic superiority in these areas.
Another sign of our structural difficulties: because a tidy quantity of shoes is needed to match the price of one single airbus.
Furthermore, in the technology market, the Chinese Peoples’ Republic tops everyone. Recently, the New York Times cited an estimate compiled by Wall Street analysts, according to which China is going to overtake the United States, not only for the number of internet users (estimated to reach 130 million by the end of the year), but also regarding the sales proceeds from the electronic commerce, which is growing at a rate of 50% per annum.
And here we come to the interest of the great American sites – MSN, Yahoo!, and Google – for the Chinese market, which already operates gigantic sites like Alibaba.com.
In fact, in January, 2006, the Google society launched the site, GOOGLE.CN, onto the Internet, the Chinese version of the research motor which is famous all over the world for its speed, but with the peculiarity of a limitation in research, having being forbidden access to thousands of sites – on the orders of the Chinese Government censure.
The decision triggered numerous negative comments from the international press, and in particular, from the review “Report without Frontiers”, which spoke of “a black day for the freedom of expression in China”.
Moreover, already in 2005, also the Yahoo! Society had to come to terms with the Chinese Authorities, consigning a copy of the informatics correspondence of the dissident journalist, Shi Tao, who was condemned to 10 years imprisonment.


The impetuous growth

By now, there seems now doubt that this will be the “Chinese Century”, above all, from the “technological” point of view. The first significant example was given in the recent Turin Olympics, in 2006, the offices of which were invaded by 4,500 desktops, 600 portables and 500 net servers, all rigorously ‘made in China’ and of Lenovo production, which has, recently, bought the PC Division of IBM, Western name of Legend (2) , the biggest informatics company in China (3) .
Lenovo was chosen by the CNIO (National Centre of Information on the Winter Olympics), as technical sponsor of the Turin Games, 2006 and, naturally, of Peking in 2008, and will exploit the attraction of the Olympics to launch its products onto the European shelves (4) : All, obviously, at unbeatable prices, also because the workers of Lenovo earn a little over a dollar an hour.
The spectre of the Chinese long informatics march is approaching always nearer to the West and, probably, some provision could be made in the meanwhile: even though, as certain China analysts of the sector sustain, “it is very likely, at least, until 2008, that the Chinese Government will try to keep its informatics pirates at bay because it wants to avoid any source of friction with the West, in light of the Peking Olympics: after that, who knows...”


The hidden face of the Chinese boom

The Long March continues on the Net.
The Chinese economic boom passes also through the informatics attacks, often aimed at stealing reserved information. As Roberto Preatoni, owner of an important society of consultants for informatics security, states: “Once, the Chinese came to the West to photograph the shop windows of shoes and fashionable clothes to copy the products. Today, instead, they rob the projects directly from the production companies’ servers. In this way, they are able to put a falsified product onto the market even before the original is commercialized. The Chinese threat is very serious also because, members of study groups, instituted in the Chinese informatics universities, are often utilized by the Peking Department of Security through participate societies of the same professors, the recruitment of which, for the Government of Peking, costs almost nothing”.
In China the inhabitants multiply, the Internet users multiply, the servers multiply and together with them, the militias of informatics bandits multiply. Platoons of well-trained unscrupulous cyber pirates, cracker and hacker of every kind, compose an army in rapid and relentless growth.
But it doesn’t finish here! The Chinese sell everything on the Internet, from human organs to poisonous medicines, carry-out arms and drug trafficking, gambling games etc: the Chinese cyber space feeds a great criminal business.
While the Chinese Government employs 30,000 police in an effort to censure Internet sites, the Centre for Internet & Society (5) of the faculty of Harvard estimates that even if it were possible to block access to 19,000 undesirable sites, this would not limit the creation of informatics viruses. In fact, it is calculated that 20% of the viruses and spam, which chokes up the e-mail of the entire world, has its origin in China. Moreover, with the 110 million Internet users and a sales figure for electronics commerce which reaches 60 billion euro per year, the Chinese cyber space is too big to keep under control in a paying way (6) .
The China Internet Project of the Berkley University has recently published a detailed map of the criminal activities which originate on the Chinese sites, and has diffused this information throughout the entire world. The information includes the sales of arms to be supplied to the police, stolen cars, identity card falsification machines, cloned credit cards and electronic devices to rob slot-machines in the casinos.
The type of fraud which hits the naïve user is increasing: for example, the creation of the so-called ‘false sites’ which attract current account holders and rob them of their personal password to withdraw cash from the bancomats.
The richest turnover of all is still pornography, including the sites which sell DVDs for pedophiles, while among the most dangerous activities is the vast on-line traffic of fake medicines and drugs, including heroin and the so-called ‘date-rape’ drug, with specific instructions on how to administer it to girls in order to reduce them to an unconscious state. The Chinese also sell ‘miraculous cures’ on the internet, against cancer and AIDS and they advertise the sale of organs (7) .

Not a small slice of the on-line business is in the hands of organized crime, which is not deterred by the severe punishments inflicted on Chinese cyber-criminals (8) , in the clear awareness that the priority of the Chinese government is to obstruct dissidents, to impede the blogs of journalists and local activists which denounce corruption and oppose the Regime, but not to avoid the ‘pollution’ of the world market (9) .
On the contrary, the Chinese Peoples’ Republic is placed as the 2nd country in the world responsible for hacker attacks (10) and is the first producer of “Trojan”, the programmes which allow the access, without authorization, of another user connected on-line. This is composed of two lines, one “client” and one “server”. The latter is a programme which, once launched, installs itself in the computer in a hidden manner and opens the doors to whoever possesses a Client equivalent to the Server, (from this the term ‘Trojan’ is taken i.e. the Horse of Troy).
According to the Cncert report (11) , 40% of the “cyber-horses of Troy” diffused throughout the world last year, came from China (17% from Hong Kong), compared to 14% produced by the United States. The fact translates into a disquieting red light alarm, above all, for the diplomatic balances abroad, in particular, with their historical antagonists: the USA, Japan and South Korea.

Kuniori Sou, analyst at the Cyber Defence Institute of Tokyo (12) , points up that in the former-Celestial Empire, the crackers (13) have perfected the organization and communicate with each other by means of a special messenger called “QQ”.
Unlike the Western pirate groups, which are sought by the Authorities and the Secret Services, “often, those Chinese ones have ties with the Government”, which possesses lists of names and telephone numbers in case it wants to intervene to block an attack and wants to ask consultation to obtain political or military censure.
According to the last statistics of the Cncert (Computer Emergency Response Team) in China, circa 100 home pages were defaced (14) : behind which, sometimes, the American-type speed-biking teenager is hiding, but on the whole, gangs of professionals of espionage and ‘phishing’ are concealed (15) , whose main scope is easy money making (16) .
Up to the moment, the technique used to strike Italian users has been that of sending an e-mail, apparently coming from his own Credit Institute (the most frequent cases being: Banca Intesa, Unicredit and Banca di Credito Co-operativo), in which certain information is requested, necessitating the user to connect to the new site, enter into the private section of his own account and fill-in a special form. Subsequently the extorted information is utilized in a variety of different ways.
Phishing has become a steadily increasing crime to fraudulently obtain private information and, today, feeds the so-called “fish market”, that is, secret telematic locations for illegal buying and selling. Among the targets of the hackers, also the same servers can be utilized as ‘strategic bouncing’ to reinforce the operative systems by diverting suspicions from the Far East.


A real danger or a blown-up affair?

The informatics guerrilla warfare began in the spring of 2001, when a fight was fought to the “last defacement” between the hackers on both the oceanic coasts. The crisis of the relations between the two countries spread to the servers of the two powers, in concurrence with a series of extremely significant facts (17) :
- 1st April: an American spy plane clashes with a Chinese fighter plane and is “confiscated” at Hainan;
- 1st May: Workers’ Day and the beginning of the Youth Week
- 7th May: 2nd Anniversary of the United States bombing of the Chinese Embassy at Belgrade during the Kosovo war.
At a distance of four years, the Chinese informatics piracy is very much stronger, expert and imposing. There is talk about a new organization with almond-shaped eyes called “Titan Rain”, ready to attack at any moment, at the first crisis in relations between the two Countries (18) . In fact, it concerns a hacker group, attributed the code name by the FBI, which has opened a dossier on it. The attacks – launched against informatics systems of a ‘sensitive’ structure, such as the aeronautics company, Lockeed Martin or the military research laboratory, Sandia – have all been traced as coming from China.
In all ascertained cases, the scope of these penetrations has been the acquisition of documentation and files of strategic importance – which appear to be veritable acts of industrial cyber-espionage. Press sources, such as the Forbes Review and the weekly Time magazine have made evident how the FBI – which, for the moment, is keeping the affair quiet – suspect that the Titan Rain is inspired by the Chinese Government itself.
This assumption has provoked an indignant reply from the Information Office of the State Council of Peking. The fact remains that, in the opinion of the analysts, it would be impossible to conduct this kind of action without the Authorities’ knowledge, in a closely controlled cybernetic context like the Chinese one.
Therefore, the danger seems real enough, even though there are some experts who throw water on the fire, like John T. Draper, for example: the man who, between the 60’s and 70’s contributed to spread the hacker ethics, known in the news media by the pseudonym of Captain Crunch (19) : “I don’t believe in a looming serious Chinese risk. I know that in Shanghai or Peking they force the VPN (Virtual Private Network) and they practice “cracking”, but exactly like everyone else. Now, there’s a lot of talk about it because the Chinese are many, also on the Net, and, therefore, they are more visible”.
Then there are totally different opinions like Preatoni, for example: “The Chinese crackers are many and the number is in continual growth. Seldom investigated and more often than not, they are after information with which to make money. It goes without saying that with the diffusion of the UMTS technology, things can only get worse: if, today, the crackers and/or phishers have at their disposal 50 million openings to tamper with (20) , tomorrow they will have a billion and a half, i.e. as many as those who possess 3rd generation cell phones today, and coincidentally, it is in this very area that the Chinese are world leaders”.


The first ‘made in China’ names
of the informatics espionage

- 1997: the Chinese cracker, Blondie Wong, member of the crew-hacker ‘Cult of the Dead Cow’, in 1997, temporarily disabled a satellite, threatening to attack the informatics networks of foreign companies which did business in China;
- 1998: a political attack by “Lou” who actuated a defacing of the site of Human Rights;
- 1999: a famous crew-hacker named “Level Seven” attacked the British Embassy site;
- 2001: a Peking student, aged 22, successfully carried out a series of Cyber-thefts to the value of two and a half million dollars;
- an ironic attack by 19 year old Wang Qun, who aimed at substituting the home pages of 30 governmental sites with a playgirl page;
- the young 17 year old, Chi Yongshu managed to damage around 110 thousand personal commputers with virus spam and phishing;
- alarm of the worm Code Red, the diffusion of which was signalled by the Chinese Cert: it was of a very rapid spreading and left the signature “Hacked by Chinese” on the systems that were hit:
- 2003: a wave of Trojans against the USA. Hundreds of computer of the American Defence Department put out of order. “Hactivists” in the no-global manner hit the Nike sites (an individual, Danny, substitutes the initial page with a ‘happy new year’ message), McDonald’s and Sony (the latter daubed with anti-Japanese messages).
Without a minimum doubt, the Chinese groups are more aggressive, more numerous and more organized than their Western counterpart. And, since computers cost so much less in China, the phenomenon is widespread among the very young.
But, as Robert Preatoni points out, the differences are also psychological: “The American hacker seeks glory and never misses an occasion to leave his coded signature, while the Chinese hacker aims at anonymity and, usually, he leaves no trace of himself”.