Jun
14
I’ve posted on several fine reports concerning China’s cyber attacks against U.S. government and private sector information systems. One from National Journal here, and another from the Heritage Foundation here.
Now comes this article on some members of the U.S. Congress claiming their office computers were hacked from within China. From the Asociated Press:
Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said Wednesday. They suggested the Chinese were seeking lists of dissidents.
Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing’s record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world. One of the lawmakers said he had been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials.
Republican Rep. Frank Wolf said four of his computers were compromised, beginning in 2006. Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, said two of his computers were attacked, in December 2006 and March 2007.
Sounds pretty outrageous. But the really strange part of the story is this:
Wolf said the FBI had told him that computers of other House members and at least one House committee had been accessed by sources working from inside China. The Republican suggested that Senate computers could have been attacked as well.
He said the hacking of computers in his Capitol Hill office began in August 2006, that he had known about it for a long time and that he had been discouraged from disclosing it by people in the U.S. government whom he refused to identify.
“The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue,” he said. “Every time I’ve started to do something I’ve been told ‘You can’t do this.’ A lot of people have made it very, very difficult.”
I hate to be the one to have to break the news to you Representative Wolf, but you are a member of the U.S. Congress, not some functionary in the bowels of a Washington D.C. Beijing appeasment bueracracy. If you haven’t been willing to “do something” about a communist regime hacking your taxpayer owned computers and making off with sensitive information because someone in the U.S. government said “You can’t do this” then you really should go sit in the dugout and let someone with a bigger bat step up to the plate.
Jun
7
More on Chinese Hackers: Heritage Foundation on “China’s Cyber Threat”
Filed Under China, Espionage, Taiwan | 2 Comments
I posted earlier on National Journal’s excellent article on China’s “cyber-militia” penetrating U.S. government and business information systems. The Heritage Foundation has also been on top of this story.
From the February 2008 Heritage report, “Trojan Dragon: China’s Cyber Threat”
The U.S. military has been the primary target of Chinese cyberattacks, followed closely by the Departments of State, Commerce, and Homeland Security. Academic, industrial, defense, and financial databases are also vulnerable. Regrettably, American officials tend to be very sensitive to China’s feelings and refrain from public allegations that the attacks are launched by Chinese agents, even though, as one U.S. cybersecurity expert points out, “the Chinese are in half of your agencies’ systems” already.
But it is not just the U.S. under cyberattack by Beijng, the Heritage report has sections on Chinese hacker penetration of systems in the United Kingdom and Taiwan:
According to an offical of Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, in 2006, Taiwan detected 13 PLA [People's Liberation Army] zero-day attacks launched within Microsoft applications and experienced a total of 178 days days of vulnerability between notifying Microsoft of the attacks and receiving the appropriate patches.
Jun
5
The first paragraph of National Journal magazine’s recent article on the growing threat posed by Chinese computer hackers:
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
Sounds like a good plot line for a spy thriller. Hopefully someone, somewhere in our vast federal government, is working on this.
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