Serious business
The FT describes the scope of Chinese cyber-spying in the US:
The Chinese military sent a shiver down the Pentagon’s spine in June by successfully hacking into an unclassified network used by the top policy advisers to Robert Gates, the defence secretary. While the People’s Liberation Army has been probing Pentagon networks hundreds of times a day for the past few years, the US is more alarmed at the growing frequency and sophistication of the attacks.
The Pentagon spent several months deflecting the recent onslaught before the PLA penetrated its system, which was shut down for more than a week for diagnosis. While officials are concerned that it downloaded information, they are more concerned about the strategic ramifications.
“The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system . . . and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” said a former official, who added that the PLA has also penetrated the networks of US defence companies and think-tanks.
One senior US official said there was “no doubt” that China was now monitoring email traffic on unclassified government networks. Intelligence professionals say China has found a simple way to compensate for its lack of expertise in recruiting non-Chinese spies in the US.
China has also come under scrutiny outside Washington. At a recent press conference with the German chancellor Angela Merkel, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, expressed “grave concern” over reports that the PLA had used “Trojan Horse” programs to insert spyware into German government networks…
Gregory Garcia, the assistant secretary for cyber security at the department of Homeland Security, says the number of cyber incidents reported to the department’s computer readiness team so far this year is 35,000. That compares to 4,100 for the whole of 2005.
This would not be a bad angle for the protectionist team of Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham to play up.