China Stealing Secrets and Accessing U.S. Lawmaker Computers

In response to trusted United States lawmakers Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, China says it is incapable of launching such an attack.

Not only is this absurd, but China has a long history of being caught with their hand in the cookie jar, most notably during the Clinton administration in the past.

The allegations are the latest in a series of cyber security problems blamed on China. Reports last year cited officials in Germany, the United States and Britain as saying government and military networks had been broken into by hackers backed by the Chinese military.

The Pentagon acknowledged last month at a closed House Intelligence committee meeting that its vast computer network is scanned or attacked by outsiders more than 300 million times each day. Most of these attacks have been said to come from China, or Chinese sources.

The real question to be asking here is, are we currently fighting an unconventional war with China? If not perhaps we should be taking proactive steps to protect ourselves.

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Amazon Outage Continues

Amazon.com was down again on Monday for a while, and is down as of this writing as well.

Estimates are Amazon.com is losing about $30,000 USD per minute with its site being unreachable by the millions who use the site each day to make purchases.

Also affected are Bloggers who rely on Amazon.com as a revenue stream. Ironically I myself used an Amazon link this past week which is currently not working. Though, this is not my main priority I am sure it is affecting other bloggers out there.

In addition it will most likely have a negative impact on Amazon's revenues for the quarter as well.

The Register has a story saying that bots are to blame for the outage which may well be possible, at this point it seems like a DDOS attack on them and some of their other sites in both the U.S. and UK. In any case Amazon so far seems fairly tight lipped about what the actual cause is.

The Register also had this to say "Whatever the cause, the outage comes as a pox on the house of Amazon. In addition to being the world's biggest online retailer, it's also trying to convince smaller companies to outsource their mission-critical storage, server and database operations to its Amazon Web Services."

In the world of business continuity, giving your small company critical systems to a large wouldbe target just does not make sense. There are much better solutions out there.

I'll keep you up to date on the issue as I am curious as how this will play out.

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