Jumping to Conclusions?

On Feb. 26th, Finjan, a secure web gateway vendor wrote on their blog that there is a possible "Sino-Japanese Cyber War" going on....

This is completely groundless and it seems that they just got caught up with the recent media headlines as calling everything a "cyber war between countries" or "cyber terrorists" is what all of the cool kids are doing these days.

They found out that two highly popular blogging sites in Japan, livedoor and yaplog, were hacked through a web application vulnerability and used to distribute malware that is downloaded from servers located in China.

Yea, I think I've heard this same story about 100 times for the past 2-3 years now.

They conclude the blog with:
"This Chinese attack is very popular and is known to infect hundreds of websites all over the world. However, we can’t ignore the fact that two very popular Japanese websites were infected in such a short period of time."

Well, I do not see any logical reasoning that just because the attackers and the victims happen to reside in countries that have had a certain history a long time ago means that this was a politically motivated attack. They were probably just looking for easy targets that gets lots of hits... And is really a Sino-Japanese War if the attacks are only happening from one side and it is nothing really out of the ordinary??

Now if they reported that this malware infected users creating a botnet which was then used to DDoS the Yasukuni Shrine website or if the Chinese hackers posted a message on the homepage or either site specifically stating "We are Chinese hackers, we hacked you because we dislike what Japan is doing, etc...", like some Chinese hackers have done in the past, then maybe this might be interesting.

Even the consensus from the comments on slashdot.jp was "Yeah, whoever wrote this blog posting is an ignorant foreigner that doesn't understand the meaning of his words"(referring to the "Cyber Sino-Japanese War")

For more information about Chinese hackers, I highly recommend checking out The Dark Visitor.

Source:
http://slashdot.jp/security/article.pl?sid=09/03/05/002254
Finjan MCRC Blog - Cyber Sino-Japanese War?