The Beijing hack attack Hong Kong-based cyber warriors build anti-China techno army © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com Editor's Note: Computer hacking - once the shadowy domain of misfits, pranksters techno-critics and spies - has taken center stage. While Y2K "czar" John Koskinen pleads publicly with hackers to cease and desist during the century date-change, reports escalate daily of cyber-terrorism threats and malevolent computer viruses embedded in e-mail, timed to activate on Jan. 1. But there is another side to hacking. WorldNetDaily's roving international correspondent, Anthony C. LoBaido, while enduring seven weeks of one of Hong Kong's hottest summers on record, was allowed into the secret realm of one of the world's leading computer hacking organizations. By Anthony C. LoBaido © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com HONG KONG -- What do blondes, Jack in the Box tacos and 21st century cyber-warfare have in common? Everything, apparently, if you're one of the elite and stealthy soldiers in Hong Kong Blondes' computer hacking universe. These committed soldiers are locked in mortal combat with the government of the People's Republic of China and the transnational corporations who profit from dealing with it. "Human rights are a global concern and we have no second thoughts about attacking the multinational corporations who profit off of the human rights abuses committed against our Chinese brothers and sisters by their own government," says Databyte Cowgirl, one of the leaders of the Hong Kong Blondes. Along with numerous other members of the Hong Kong Blondes, Databyte Cowgirl was interviewed by WorldNetDaily over the course of seven weeks in July and August of 1999, as well as during the past several weeks. "The Chinese government officials are just as bad as the Nazis. Only, for some reason, the multinational corporations find China and other communist regimes around the world to be more politically digestible," she added. "The gross human rights violations of the Chinese leadership, like the logai gulag system, religious persecution, forced organ harvesting, abortion and the crackdown on the Falong Gong Tai Chi movement are the epitome of evil. The only way we have to fight against them is via the high-tech realm." The story of the Hong Kong Blondes is a fascinating, twisted tale, stranger than fiction. To begin, the group was formed by the infamous (to the communist Chinese dictatorship) or renowned (to computer "hackers" the world over) Blondie Wong. Although his name is unfamiliar to the general public of both American and China, Blondie Wong is a man who is well known to the Chinese government, the People's Liberation Army, the National Security Agency of the U.S., the CIA, FBI, Interpol and numerous Fortune 500 companies. Although he now lives in exile in Toronto, Canada, under the protection of armed bodyguards, as a young boy Blondie Wong saw his beloved father stoned to death by Chairman Mao's Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Years later he traveled to the United Kingdom, where he entered university and studied to become a teacher. In the summer of 1989, after witnessing the Tienanmen Square massacre on television, Blondie Wong decided to form the Hong Kong Blondes and their sister hacking group, the Yellow Pages. At first, Wong started small -- organizing a close circle of friends he believed he could trust. Later he launched an international recruiting campaign aimed at some of the finest computer engineering universities in America and around the world. Ranging from Cal Tech to MIT, Blondie Wong assembled an elite army of sympathetic hackers. Young men and women who only a few short years before had been high school geeks with thick glasses and pocket protectors now became the front line of attack against the communist Chinese government. They pledged allegiance to Blondie Wong's crusade against communist China and turned their collective computer science and engineering skills into a sharp spear. Within a few months, this spear was capable of penetrating the internal affairs of China's military industrial complex, as well as the Western transnational corporations that do business with China. "One of the reasons that human rights in China are not further ahead is because they have been de-linked from American trade policy," Wong said in a document released through Cult of the Dead Cow, a U.S.-based hacker group that has advised the Blondes on technical issues. "When human rights considerations were associated with doing business with the United States, at least there was the threat of losing trade relations, of some form of punishment. Now this just doesn't exist. Beijing successfully went around Congress and straight to American business, so in effect, businessmen started dictating foreign policy," Wong explained. "By taking the side of profit over conscience, business has set our struggle back so far that they have become our oppressors too," Wong said. To deal with their oppressors, the Blondes began reading the private email of multinational executives and People's Liberation Army officers. They downloaded secure information such as satellite access codes, and even produced forged credentials giving Hong Kong and mainland colleagues access to People's Liberation Army facilities. Closer to home in Hong Kong, the Blondes began meeting at a local Jack in the Box restaurant, where they would munch on tacos while exchanging customized diagnostic software tools with one another. These tools were used to launch attacks against the PLA's computer systems through DoS or "Denial of Service" - in which a system is overloaded with millions of "hits" on a website. Other attack modes include erasing important data, altering and planting disinformation, and "spoofing" or attacking the processor of a computer network so as to gain root privileges -- the ability to execute commands and functions -- within the PLA network. As time progressed, members of the Hong Kong Blondes leadership told WorldNetDaily they began actually to install codes within the PLA computer mainframes. By using cellular modems, they were able to monitor the electromagnetic signals emitted by PLA computers by remote means. The Blondes even planted transmitters within the offices of the Chinese government, People's Liberation Army and foreign corporate headquarters in order to monitor their activities and infiltrate their computer networks. For those who doubt Blondie Wong's legions and capabilities, the group, as if to prove itself, temporarily disabled a key People's Liberation Army military satellite. Several PLA military officers questioned by WorldNetDaily in Hong Kong confirmed this intrusion. In fact, the Chinese government and military officially recognized the unauthorized attack on their hardened, restricted systems in a press release. "In 1999, there were 228 cyber-attacks launched within Hong Kong, in 1998, there were only 34," said Lo Yik Kee, chief superintendent of the newly formed Police Computer Crime Bureau, which will start operations on January 1, 2000. "We've seen a large increase in hacking incidents and due to the transnational nature of this kind of activity, it will only increase in the future." The Jack in the Box restaurant where the Hong Kong Blondes used to meet was closed down, putting an end to the group's taco fests. Yet, the space was renovated into an Internet café, from which the group first launched its PLA infiltrations. Since then, the cyber cafe, which stood near the TST subway station on Hong Kong Island, has been closed down as well. But the hacking unit formed by Blondie Wong continues to grow. According to China's Ministry of Public Security, there were 72,000 cyber-attacks launched against the PLA on mainland Chinese soil in the first nine months of this year. Of those, 165 were admitted to have been "successful." A spokesman for the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C. told WorldNetDaily that there are "less than 1,100 recognized hacking experts worldwide." Blondie Wong and his followers definitely appear to be included in that number. "The PLA is about to launch a fourth division of its military," said Ashton Tyler Baines in a recent interview with WorldNetDaily. A London-born computer programmer who now lives in the New Territories north of Kowloon Island in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Baines has been a member of the Hong Kong Blondes for the past two years. "The PLA wants to control the cyberspace of its enemies, while at the same time preventing attacks on its own cyberspace," she explained. Baines told WorldNetDaily that the Hong Kong Blondes and the Yellow Pages have "already placed over 40 social engineers [computer operators who act as moles for the Blondes] inside the PLA's newly created cyberspace division." "The PLA is in for a rude awakening. We can infiltrate, alter and even crash several of their networks. We're putting in backdoors. We're writing bad code into the CD-ROMs they use as backups for their off-line servers. We have already infected the backup off-site copies of their CD-ROMs. We understand most of their security protocols because we wrote most of them into the software," she added. As one would expect, the Hong Kong Blondes are a secretive group who depend totally on the honor of their members. Yet their leaders told WorldNetDaily they "encourage other interested parties to form their own hacking groups." The Hong Kong Blondes won't disclose the numbers on their membership roster for two reasons. Primary, of course, is concern for the security of their members. But the Blondes also admit they aren't exactly sure just how many elite hackers around the world have aligned themselves with their agenda. "Ironically, we follow Chairman Mao's dictates of warfare. We are organized into small cells which are independent of one another. Cut off one head of a cell, and another will emerge in its place," said Baines. "Anyone can join our cyber army. The goals and objectives are clear and well known in underground hacking circles. First, infiltrate the PLA -- their communications satellites, space program and supercomputers, which can perform billions of operations in a single second. Second, the multinational corporations who are feeding the PLA weapons frenzy. Third, we like to go after COSCO (the Chinese Overseas Shipping Company) which is nothing more than a front for the PLA to acquire the financial muscle it needs to expand and threaten Free Asia and the West." According to Databyte Cowgirl, the Blondes and the Yellow Pages are also targeting the financial operations of Ted Turner's CNN and his Atlanta Braves Baseball team, as well as transnational companies "like Coca-Cola who do business with the Islamic jihad government of Sudan." She was referring to the Sudanese "holy war" that has resulted in the deaths of millions of black South Sudanese Christians since 1983. Additional targets include AT&T's new Lucent Technologies, which will handle future "cashless" transactions over the telephone, and the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa corporation, the latter with known ties to the People's Liberation Army. Hutchison Wampoa is due to take over the operation of the strategically vital Panama Canal in the year 2000. "It's high time we began attacking the money the elite has stashed away by arming the PLA and profiting on the suffering of the Chinese people," said Baines. "Banking, stocks, bonds, IRAs, gold bullion, money transfers, pension accounts and everything else you can think of. If the CIA can go after the bank accounts of (Serbian President) Milosevich, then we can go after the private bank accounts of China-lovers like Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. Kissinger makes millions of dollars every year speaking and lobbying on behalf of Western multinational engagement with China. That's blood money on his hands and we intend to take it back -- so he'd better be hiding his money under his mattress." Tracey Kinchen, a former M1-5 agent with British Intelligence, assists the Hong Kong Blondes and the Yellow Pages with acquiring fake travel credentials and other sensitive items needed for international travel. Kinchen brings three qualities to the Hong Kong Blondes which its members claim are indispensible. First, she is the group's only natural blonde. Second, she is the spitting image of Hollywood actress Julie Holden. Third, and most importantly they say, she loves Jack in the Box tacos. In an interview with WorldNetDaily conducted at the World Trade Center in Bangkok, Thailand, Kinchen spelled out the reasons she supports the Hong Kong Blondes' efforts. "Blondie Wong and the Hong Kong Blondes would never want to hurt anyone. They follow Ghandi's and Martin Luther King's worldview of non-violence," she told WorldNetDaily. "But they also understand that the nature of warfare has changed. Who could have known that the supercomputers the Pentagon only dreamed about a half century ago would one day become home appliances capable of the most high-tech industrial espionage?" Kinchen said that information technology is the "refuge of last resort" and the "perfect medium to conduct low intensity warfare." "The NSA's budget is eight times larger than the CIA's. They handle most of the intelligence workload. Yet, with all of their state of the art equipment they haven't been able to touch Blondie Wong, or any of us for that matter." While maintaining strict loyalty to Blondie Wong and his compatriot, the shadowy Lemon Li who lives in exile in St Nazare, France, the Hong Kong Blondes and the Yellow Pages are rapidly expanding. In addition to cells at Cal Tech and MIT, the group has set up new cells at Baylor, Texas A&M, West Point, Liberty Baptist -- and the Air Force Academy in Colorado. "Our movement is a lot like witchcraft in colonial Salem," said Michael Ming, a Chinese-born computer science student at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. "Most people assume "The Crucible" version of unjust witch hunts in Salem is the truth. But I believe witchcraft was real and powerful in Salem. Not because of the witches, but because the general population believed that it had real power. As long as the PLA knows we're out there, we'll be agitating them and taking away their comfort zone." Ming added, "Now that the NSA, Echelon and PLA understand that we have a virtually undetectable, un-infiltratable, loose-knit organization with total allegiance to Blondie Wong and his goals, we're going to become even more of a threat to them. Even if they found us and took us out, thousands would rise up to take our places. Even the PLA can't kill that fast." The Hong Kong Blondes recently presented this WorldNetDaily reporter with a large mahogany replica of Noah's Ark, complete with 500 animal and people pieces. The ark was hewn by persecuted priests who languish inside the boundaries of mainland China. This band of anarchists, snoops, humanists, Christians, Buddhists and blondes, both real and imagined, has united in pursuit of a common goal -- to "fight the powers that be" by "hacking the planet." This reporter recently said goodbye to the Hong Kong Blondes' Thailand-based cell at the "Pam Pam" restaurant in Bangkok's World Trade Center. Pam Pam is the innocuous name given to Thailand's newest Jack in the Box franchise. The restaurant's menu features every item Jack in the Box lovers crave, from curly fries to sourdough burgers. Conspicuously absent are the tacos. Yet, hanging on the walls of Pam Pam's restaurant are giant pictures of the beloved tacos. And just below those pictures sit a neat row of state of the art computers, just waiting for the birth of a new Hong Kong Blondes cell. Hack the planet. Anthony C. LoBaido is a roving international correspondent for WorldNetDaily.