Chinese attacks in cyberspace

Today’s Financial Times contains two (here and here) very interesting articles on the People’s Liberation Army’s increasingly frequent attacks on US government networks. One attack in June successfully breached a system connected to Defense Secretary Robert Gates computer.

According to the articles, because of their unprecedented sophistication, these attacks are beginning to seriously worry government officials.

I find it strange that both the US and China’s military hackers regularly break into each other’s networks and get caught, yet  diplomatic crisis develops. In fact, it seems that the US government has purposefully kept the Chinese attacks rather ‘hush hush’ to prevent any sort of public backlash against the Chinese.

I  hope that our government takes a hard line with the Chinese–something along the line of what Germany’s Angela Merkel did, following a Chinese attack on German networks. Do we have to tolerate Chinese probes as long as we continue to do the same to them?

As long as we’re able to gather intelligence while preventing them from getting anything too important on us, I don’t see a problem with the status quo.

Still, what seems to be a bigger problem is the threat that the Chinese could shut down Pentagon networks during an armed crisis.

After reading the above articles, I wanted to know more about the US government’s safeguards against cyber-warfare. This 1998 document shows that as early as 1991, members the US military had begun to worry about attacks on our information infrastructure.

The ‘98 document was written by former NSA director Kenneth A Minihan, who was also a Lieutenant General of the Air Force. Looking at this document and the FT articles,  one gathers that the Air Force is the department most involved with cyber-security.  Indeed, after doing some Googling, I stumbled across this UPI article on spacewar.com:

On Dec. 7, 2005, cyberspace became an official Air Force domain after Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. T. Michael Moseley introduced a new mission statement. The statement informed Air Force personnel that their new mission was to “deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests — to fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace.”

Moseley said that Air Force leaders establishing a new “cyber command” to be responsible for fighting in that domain, commenting: “To deliver the full spectrum of effects we will evolve a coherent enterprise, with war fighting ethos, ready to execute any mission in peace, crisis and war. We will foster a force of 21st Century warriors, capable of delivering the full spectrum of kinetic and non-kinetic, lethal and non-lethal effects across all three domains. This is why we are standing up an operational command for cyberspace, capable of functioning as a supported or supporting component of the joint force.”

A month agao, WIRED magazine ran a rather interesting article on how a theoretical Chinese cyber attack on the US might work. You can check it out here.

Another WIRED article asserts that “the Pentagon doesn’t seem to fully grasp the dangerous potential of this new domain of warfare.”

Hopefully, China’s recent activities have worried the Pentagon enough to not only disclose the story to the press, but also to step up its research into cyber-warfare.