SFGate

Click and bicker U.S. and Chinese hackers explain their online war of words

Carrie Kirby, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 8, 2001

For the past week, American and Chinese computer hackers waged a war of words, breaking into scores of Web sites and using them to spread messages of hate aimed at each other's countries.

They saw themselves as patriots. They used other people's Web pages to tell the world that they were angry about last month's spy plane incident. The Chinese side also expressed rage over last year's bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade.

But the messages the hackers on both sides wrote weren't exactly Nathan Hale material.

"Beat down American imperialists," read one page, attacked yesterday by the "Honker Union of China," the Chinese group that has organized the attacks from that side. "Honker" is a phrase Chinese hackers coined to mean "patriotic hacker." The first part, hong, means red.

Messages from Team USA had a less political bent and more often were studded with racial slurs. One, signed by "Project-China," simply read, "u suck chinaman." Many are unprintable.

The battle started last week after the National Infrastructure Protection Center, the federal agency that tracks electronic terrorism, warned that Chinese hackers were planning to attack multiple Web sites based in the United States between April 30 and May 7, the anniversary of the Belgrade embassy bombing. Yesterday, the warning expired, and indeed, the attacks seemed to be winding down as expected.

Looking back, the online spat left little real damage in its wake. Hundreds of sites were temporarily hijacked, but most victims recovered within a day or so. Victims included a few government sites in both countries and a number of small, obscure businesses, from the Bubbles Car Wash in Houston to the Jianlong Decorative Materials Factory in Guangdong province.

Security experts -- and other hackers -- say the American participants were mostly rebellious kids, lacking both real interest in international affairs and the computer skills to inflict serious damage.

"So far we've got a bunch of middle-class kids in a political pissing match, " said Oxblood Ruffin, who belongs to the venerable hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow. "(These are) nickel-and-dime hacks that allow criminals to graffiti a Web site, usually with a pseudo-political message that often includes 'greetZz' and shout-outs to his crew."

Four anonymous hackers, culled from both sides, agreed to share their views on the dispute with The Chronicle in an online interview. The participants are:

-- "Pr0phet," an American hacker between 20 and 25 (he likes to cultivate a little mystique), who is by day a technical worker at an Internet service provider on the East Coast. After work, he's been spending several hours a night cracking Web sites.

-- "Dis," another U.S. participant who lives in the Pacific Northwest, is taking a year off between high school and college. He used some of that free time to start a group called Hackweiser, whose members have all been taking down Chinese sites.

-- "D-Boy" is a 25-year-old Chinese hacker who lives in Ningbo and calls himself a newbie hacker.

-- An anonymous spokesman for "World of Hate," a group of 15 hackers from the United States and other countries, including the United Kingdom and Brazil.

The group's spokesman says World of Hate is responsible for hacking 20 Chinese servers.

The Chronicle: Why are you doing this?

D-Boy: Because I am Chinese. Because of the embassy and the plane.

Dis: We are the people, the only ones, who will stand up for the United States as the freedom fighters and show that we are no force to be kicked around like a small dog.

Pr0phet: I get 150 to 200 e-mails a day supporting us. It's inspiring. They are proud to have a U.S. hacker representing them, so that gives me more purpose. (Quoting an e-mail) "Saw your hack of the Chinese Web site. Keep up the good work. You make me proud to be an American. Kick their bloody cyberasses!"

The Chronicle: Were you interested in world affairs before this?

D-Boy: No.

World of Hate: No! I hate politics as my mom is on the local council. That's really put me off politics for life. I am interested now . . . and in a few years time, I can see a lot more "cyber warfare" happening. This is just the beginning.

Dis: Yes, I was. World War II (got me interested). I was studying that back in eighth grade.

The Chronicle: Why haven't hackers on either side done any serious damage? Why have they stuck to defacing Web sites or shutting them down with denial of service attacks?

World of Hate: By defacing, people see what you have done. And that is what counts. Your rants and beliefs get known.

D-Boy: We like to change the home page and type what we want to say. The point is we want the USA to know what we want to say.

Pr0phet: (If we wanted to) we could take down almost every important router in China. It would disable the majority of their e-commerce.

Dis: If you get the backbone routers of certain key ISPs around China then you could virtually end Internet access for them.

The Chronicle: Do you feel that your governments and other people are supporting you?

D-boy: I don't know what the government thinks about. But Chinese people will support me and my pals. Of course, I may get arrested, but it is worth it.

Dis: Yes. Hackweiser has even had war veterans asking to donate money to the effort. And we do have certain people in the government helping us and giving us support. No technical support, but moral support. They know my prior record -- I have been raided before. When I was 14, I had my laptop and discs and main box seized.

By yesterday, the war seemed to have fizzled out. Attrition.org, a service that tracks Web defacements, recorded few attacks on Chinese sites yesterday, and only a handful by Chinese hackers on American sites.

Pr0phet dropped out of the war Saturday, complaining that "When I started reading sites calling the Chinese (racist names) -- with pornographic images and hateful comments -- I was embarrassed for us."

D-boy, the Chinese hacker, said he and his friends wouldn't stop until the United States provided further explanation for the spy plane incident and for last year's embassy bombing.

Security experts say that the spat that Pr0phet, Dis, the rep from World of Hate and D-Boy participated in is child's play compared with what would go on in an actual cyberwar, in which whole sections of the Internet could actually be shut down, cutting off governments and businesses from information they've come to depend on.

"I am a believer of the true potential and threat of cyberwar," said Winn Schwartau, author of "Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway." "All we're seeing right now is just noise."

-- Anonymous, May 08, 2001