In computer news this week, 04/24/2001

Chinese hackers and how to read their - or any other - web pages:

A CNN story this week reported that Federal authorities on Monday said they were attempting to trace the origin of a series of hacker attacks that appear to have been sparked by the United States spy plane crisis in China. The hackers have showered U.S. government and business Web sites with eulogies for the downed Chinese fighter pilot, denouncements of imperialism and crude references.

Other websites were defaced with pictures of Chinese flags, political slogans in Chinese and English and photographs of the missing Chinese pilot Wang Wei.

One hacker posting read: "As we are Chinese, we love our motherland and its people deeply. We are so indignant about the intrusion from the imperialism. The only thing we could say is that, when we are needed, we are ready to devote anything to our motherland, even including our lives."

A Web page hosting the Hackers Union of China posted a list of 10 Web sites hacked in memory of the missing pilot. The Hackers Union refers to itself as a "network security organization" on its Web site, cnhonker.com.

I surfed out to this site to read it, but found it was written entirely in Chinese, and unreadable, except for a couple graphics, and a hitmeter which showed over 284000 hits. I was interested in seeing what other hacker sites this page might have links to, so I used a little bit of internet sleuthing anyone can do on just about any webpage, to see the actual source code behind the webpage.

Right click with your mouse on a blank part of the main webpage you are looking at, and a menu should popup with one of the choices being "View source", meaning let me see the actual html - or internet language plain english source code - that makes this page work. When you do this, the windows wordpad text editor opens up the webpage, and you can now read the code behind the web page. If you think some webpages are interesting, wait till you start snooping behind the scenes. Here you will find hidden programmers notes and comments and a lot of information that doesn't show up on the web page that you as a surfer view.

On this Chinese hacker page, they're trying to attract people using the internet search keywords of Hacking,Hacker,Crackers,Virus,Virii,DOS,Denial of Service,spoofing, ,password,port monitors,key logger,phreaking,boxes, - all hacker terms, so you can tell the intent of this page is not legitimate.

All the html code is in plain language English, so if you know html you can eventually figure out the page structure and what everything does. Even if you don't, you can still look at this code and see clearly identifiable web page addresses this page points to - and you can easily cut and paste these into your browser to see what's on them.

All the webpage titles and choices are in Chinese, but next to each line is the readable html code which you can figure out.

So in the old days, political controversies would generate phone calls and telegrams and letters to the editor. Now you have to remember to protect your internet website from hack attack.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230