Obama says that Chinese cyberhacking is 'unacceptable'. The White House said he will no longer stay at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel, which was bought by a Chinese company last year. Obama also said that China should fear confrontation online: "I guarantee you we will win if we have to."

This is a pretty bold statement. I have to say though, I have very little confidence in our ability to "counter hack"; and even less confidence in our ability to determine the origins of an attack on us.

Starting with the latter: Some years ago, there was an exploit in MS SQL server that was used to propagate a non-malicious (but very aggressive) worm. This worm crippled most of the internet backbones, and brought a large portion of the internet to a screeching halt for a day or so. Some of you may remember it as the "Sapphire" or "Slammer" worm. Now, we all know that in the end, the US blamed China for this, but here's the fun part: at the time, I was part of a community of people that produced cheats for an online game. This game was about to go pay to play, and we certainly couldn't have that. One particular member was looking for ways to get the server source from the company, so that we could make private servers... they succeeded... by using an exploit in MS SQL server. The company that hosted the game was NOT based in China, and the sapphire worm did not originate from China. More so, the worm was never meant to have such a broad reaching effect... who knew so many organizations in the world used MS SQL and didn't apply KNOWN security patches.

Thw moral of this story, to me, is that the US has no idea how to track attacks, or evwn determine is something was meant to be an attack. Now, you could say that over the years they may have improved... but I have been a software engineer on MANY government contracts over the years... and while none of them have been directly in cyber security; I can say 100 percent without reservation that the quality of IT professionals on government projects is SEVERELY lacking.

Of course, like I said, I have not been on a cyber security team... who knows, I could be wrong... maybe they've made drastic improvements there, and just still hire morons everywhere else.

/r/worldnews Thread Link - bbc.com