Most of the time when I lookup the IP addresses used in FTP and SSH scans, they belong to some network in china. And apparently the last two times when the Asus website was modified (this time exploiting another unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer, with .ani files), they were loading exploit code from certain servers in China.

Well, I guess you just cannot trust their regime; if it isn’t actively encouraging the hacking activities, it at least completely fails to do something about them (you might recall that China tries to censor much of the Internet, but apparently they aren’t able to firewall off hackers going out?).

It’s hard to tell what their motivations are. I guess it’s military interests (i.e. having points of attack in case of a war) combined with industrial espionage.

To me this means, that I can’t really trust developers from China, and that I better double-check their code. While I don’t assume them to be bad guys, you never know what their government might force them to do. Sorry about that.