Chinese cyber threat?

I found a recent article at American Foreign Policy Council re a stepped up China cyber threat. Anyone know of any good reports/studies on the subject? Thanks.

fromtheright said:

I found a recent article at American Foreign Policy Council re a stepped up China cyber threat. Anyone know of any good reports/studies on the subject? Thanks.

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I do know that China has alot of hackers. Hardcore hackers, that is.

Well that's a little vague. But, yes, I believe the US does believe there is a threat from China in this respect.

Though it is worth noting that the attacks that have gone on in recent years - as far as I know - were the work of nationalist geeks with too much time on their hands.

Yes...I'm pretty sure the Chinese have a stable of computer warriors whose main objective is confronting the US. Cyber-warfare is something that the US has neglected. Jihadists have been able to give the US and its allies hell on the internet. China has probably learned from this. Plus, cyberwarfare is an excellent assymetric strategy, and China obviously puts credence in asymmetric methods when confronting the US, at least in the short term as it builds up its military power.

However I would hesistate to say that there is a Chinese cyber-threat though. I doubt that China is going to lauch some sort of massive cyber attack on the US. China is too smart to not realize that a war cannot be won in cyberspace.

Of course, the biggest question is if the threat is posed most by someone in the PLA or someone working out a relative's basement. Private Hackers, IMHO, are even more dangerous than Hackers who are part of an armed group or national army such as the PLA or PLO, largely because some of the best are Freelance and know little of what they are actualy doing. It's considered something of a game and male-to-male chest thumping amongst themselves.

I remember hearing some months ago about a private hacker who went into DOD files to get access to information on UFO coverups. It shows that there is al ot to be desired.

The U.S. must not underestimate China. A few years ago the chinese had significantly improve their nuclear technology through espionage. America's nuclear secrets were compromised.

The U.S. must significantly improve the security of its computers in order to stop Chinese hacking. America's enemies knew that the U.S. military is very much dependent on computers. The U.S. military must take this very seriously. Failure to do so may result wherein it is unable to respond to a surprise WMD attacks on U.S. soil because its communications systems were compromise by cyber attacks.

watchman said:

The U.S. must not underestimate China. A few years ago the chinese had significantly improve their nuclear technology through espionage. America's nuclear secrets were compromised.

The U.S. must significantly improve the security of its computers in order to stop Chinese hacking. America's enemies knew that the U.S. military is very much dependent on computers. The U.S. military must take this very seriously. Failure to do so may result wherein it is unable to respond to a surprise WMD attacks on U.S. soil because its communications systems were compromise by cyber attacks.

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There's no proof that China's nuclear technology improved through espionage. The charges towards Wen Ho Lee were thrown out and a very conservative judge apologized to him on behalf of the United States on how unfairly he was treated by the government. Would that happen if this man is charged of being responsible of giving all the US's secrets to China? Also the incident, that sparked the investigation where Lee was eventually targeted, where a mysterious Chinese guy that walked into the US embassy in China and simply dropped off a drawing similar to the W-88 warhead to exact dimensions leading "experts" to believe as proof that China stole US stole technology IS NOT PROOF! There are pictures publicly out there of the W-88 like the ones shown on TV during the scandal. So I'm sure someone can buy paper or a ruler at a Chinese office supply store and either trace over the picture or takes measurements.

How about they learned it from the Russians? Or how about the US gave them the technology? I heard Samuel Cohen, founder of the neutron bomb, being interviewed by Michael Savage. That's right! That Michael Savage, right wing extremely extreme neo-con radio talk show host, before he went national. Cohen said that during the Reagan years, the administration thought there was the real possibility that the USSR was going to invade China. Since the Pentagon couldn't count on the reliability of Chinese nuclear technology, the Reagan administration allowed Chinese nuclear scientists into the national laboratories to learn how to make nukes. That's a whole lot different from stealing and espionage.

Or how about this possibilty... the Chinese did it on their own. But then that's pure fantasy isn't it?

I understand what you mean by "underestimating."

watchman said:

The U.S. must not underestimate China. A few years ago the chinese had significantly improve their nuclear technology through espionage. America's nuclear secrets were compromised.

The U.S. must significantly improve the security of its computers in order to stop Chinese hacking. America's enemies knew that the U.S. military is very much dependent on computers. The U.S. military must take this very seriously. Failure to do so may result wherein it is unable to respond to a surprise WMD attacks on U.S. soil because its communications systems were compromise by cyber attacks.

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Sounds like some riff-raff drifted in here from some far ring wing sites (not to be named). To these people, those inscrutable Chicoms would be fighting with pointed sticks if it weren't for their espionage and that traitor Bill Clinton. And they talk about how a US-China war will bring about "the rapture" (where God comes down and takes all the good Christians to heaven).

Roger, I gotta tell you, China is pretty low on the agenda of the religous right here in America (good for China ) and they think of any war as something having to do with the rapture.

Back on subject and away from Republican-baiting: The science of codebreaking is not something you hear about much. Everyone knows about Bletchley Park, ULTRA and the Enigma in WWII, but after that most codebreaking is still classified. We can only wonder how successful China is in reading the signals of other nations. Does China even have a public signals intelligence unit/bureau? The US has the NSA, and although CNN and other TV stations occasionally do a show on their terrorism-oriented screening of millions or billions of emails, phone calls and other electronic transmisson, you never hear about more conventional things like trying to break other nations military and diplomatic signals codes. There has been some speculation that with the advent of very powerful computers, codes have become unbreakable, but I think that that works bith ways.

Finn McCool said:

Back on subject and away from Republican-baiting: The science of codebreaking is not something you hear about much. Everyone knows about Bletchley Park, ULTRA and the Enigma in WWII, but after that most codebreaking is still classified. We can only wonder how successful China is in reading the signals of other nations. Does China even have a public signals intelligence unit/bureau? The US has the NSA, and although CNN and other TV stations occasionally do a show on their terrorism-oriented screening of millions or billions of emails, phone calls and other electronic transmisson, you never hear about more conventional things like trying to break other nations military and diplomatic signals codes. There has been some speculation that with the advent of very powerful computers, codes have become unbreakable, but I think that that works bith ways.

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The new generation of cryptography is in quantum computing and other interesting quantum phyics. There's news recently about a demonstrated cryptographic network using ideas from quantum physics to improve security. Also, there's continuuing research on quantum computers, you don't hear about them very often. Quantum computing has the potential to crack existing public-key cryptographic systems (based on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers) far faster than brute force. One can only speculate how capable the top-secret cutting-edge ones are. Really though, public-key encryption is probably more of a commercial/civilian technology than a governmental/military one, since it has this well-known weakness. I would imagine communications requiring high security would not use public-key encryption, but physically transported keys and some (potentially undisclosed) algorithm. Public-key encryption is useful for digital communications and battlefield networking, where key distribution would be a bit more troublesome and where the key can be updated quite frequently as to minimize the fallout of having any one of them guessed. Anyway my knowledge of cryptography is only elementary.

I think it was within a year ago that there was some news attention given to some Chinese academics who found some "weaknesses" in a commonly-used cryptographic algorithm. Weaknesses don't mean it's cracked, maybe only saying under certain very specific and rare conditions, cracking would be easier than believed previously. But it sure made a splash in the news. There's certainly on-going research in academia and of course military/governmental agencies around the world, you just don't hear about it. The NSA tries to hire a lot of smart math graduates. Probably the news you hear about are the ones that mean little.