China emerges as leader in cyberwarfare
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In recent weeks, China has been accused of hacking the Pentagon as well as British and German government offices.
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Chinese nationals face increasing security risks overseas due to the country's growing global presence, a senior official was quoted as saying on Thursday.
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InfoWorld - The Chinese government took steps during 2006 to&#160;increase its control&#160;and monitoring of Internet access by the country&#39;s growing Internet population, the U.S. Department of State said in a human-rights report released on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Chinese premier Wen Jiabao described reports of Chinese hackers breaking into German computers as a matter of "grave concern" and said Monday that his country will cooperate with Germany to resolve the matter. Jiabao's comments, made during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Beijing, were prompted by a report published two days earlier in the German news magazine Der Spiegel claiming that Chinese hackers had been able to infect German government computers with spyware. Merkel said that for Chinese relations with industrialized countries to move ahead, everyone needs to "respect a set of game rules" and "protect intellectual property rights." Security experts from Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and Federal Data Protection Office discovered Trojan horse programs in computers used in several government ministries, including the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Economics and the Research and Development Ministry, as well as Merkel's office, the report in Der Spiegel said. Although the first Trojan horse software was detected in May, there are continued attempts to sneak spyware into government computers via the Internet, according to Spiegel. Security experts monitoring data traffic were able to stop the transmission of a 160G-byte file from a German ministry to China, but no one would say if hackers succeeded in stealing other files, the magazine reported. BSI and the Federal Data Protection Office declined to comment. A spokesman at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, while declining to comment on the Spiegel story specifically, said that the federal government, in general, is aware of increased efforts to steal information from computers in the private and public sectors. "We are making a huge effort to ensure that government systems remain protected from outside attacks," the spokesman said. "So far, we've been able to avoid any damage." (Information from pool reporters located in Beijing was used in this report.)
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China says a Financial Times report Monday blaming the People's Liberation Army for a hack into Pentagon computers through a computer system in Defense Secretary Robert Gates' office is false. Chinese officials say they are opposed to cybercrime.
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The practice of cyber-espionage is rapidly moving beyond the government sector and finding its way into the world of international business, according to experts with SANS Institute, one of the world's top IT security training organizations.While the United States and Chinese governments, most notably, have accused each other in recent years of carrying out surreptitious hacking campaigns aimed at stealing strategic information from their respective IT systems -- and many security experts believe that both countries, and many others, are actively engaging in such electronic warfare -- leaders with SANS maintain that the practice has recently begun to spill over into the private sector with greater frequency.According to the training institute's latest research, cyber-espionage efforts funded by "well-resourced organizations" -- including both government-backed and private efforts -- will expand significantly during 2008, in particular as overseas companies look to gain an upper hand in negotiating business deals with large companies based in the U.S. and Europe.In one common scenario, said Alan Paller, director of research for SANS, organizations in the process of establishing legitimate partnerships with such companies are willing to pay hackers to break into those firms' IT systems to gather competitive information to gain an advantage at the bargaining table.More companies than ever before are finding out that they have been victimized in such a manner based on the discovery of their sensitive data in the hands of hackers and other fraudsters who have been apprehended by law enforcement officials, the expert contends."Cyber-espionage is clearly growing across the board. It was much bigger in 2007 than in previous years, and it is expanding slowly into economic espionage involving both businesses and government entities," Paller said. "This really has a lot of significant implications because people who have never thought of themselves as targets for this type of attack have suddenly become a sweet spot, and many are not prepared to defend themselves."Paller said that federal law enforcement agencies have been contacting private industry firms directly to inform them that their data may have been compromised. From closely-protected product designs to company financials, the expert said that cyber-espionage is already working its way into many different areas of business."If you live in a foreign country and you want to do business with a big American company, you want to negotiate the best possible deal, and we're seeing more evidence of instances where parties have clearly been paid to break into a companies' computers, as well as those of their accountants, consultants and lawyers, to find information that can be used to tilt deals in their favor," Paller said. "In some cases, it's fair to say that the people who are negotiating these deals overseas end up with more information than the people that are being paid to negotiate with them."Paller said that while in many cases the business data being stolen is being used to the advantage of private industry players, the training organization believes that a fair amount of the corporate espionage activity may be backed by government sponsors.While such attacks have been somewhat common among government and defense contractors for years, he said, the process is highlighting a lack of perception regarding security risks inside other major U.S. businesses.SANS reported that the attack of choice in many cases of cyber-espionage is a targeted spear phishing campaign that attempts to dupe workers into opening tainted attachments made to appear as if they come from people they work with.The content of the virus-laden attachments is often tailored to look exactly like legitimate materials that the employees involved might send to each other, making it more likely that users will open the messages and remain unaware that they may have been compromised, Paller said.Attackers crafting the messages most often use newly discovered Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, also known as zero day flaws, to further hide their activities and to circumvent anti-virus systems, according to the expert."This type of business-driven cyber-espionage is already happening a lot more frequently than some people might think," said Paller. "We're only finding real evidence because more companies are hearing from law enforcement when someone finally discovers the stolen data."On the flip side, SANS is also predicting that so-called insider data theft carried out against U.S. businesses by trusted employees will also continue to flourish.One of the factors accelerating that trend is the ability for attackers to attempt to attack their employers both from inside their networks and from the outside using known vulnerabilities they discover in their work, the group said.With traditional security perimeters increasingly being taxed by the use of mobile devices that are allowed to come onto corporate networks from outside the workplace, SANS said that workers are finding many new opportunities to sneak information out the door and sell for a profit.One of the key strategies that organizations need to embrace to thwart the insider problem is to put into place more substantial defenses that limit access to various IT systems and data stores based on the specific level of admission to those assets that individuals need to do their jobs, the training group said.
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As the world shrinks, international cybercrime is growing in scope and sophistication.
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(InfoWorld) - China Tuesday denied allegations that its militaryÂ hacked a Pentagon networkÂ in JuneÂ -- the second time in as many weeks that the country has responded to charges of sponsoring computer attacks. "Some people are making wild accusations against China and wantonly saying the Chinese military attacked the Pentagon's computer network," Jiang Yu, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said in Beijing, according to the state-controlled Xinhua news service. "These are totally groundless and also reflect a Cold War mentality," she added. Jiang was responding to a story published by the Financial Times this weekend that quoted American officials who said the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was behind the June hack. One person familiar with the incident told the Financial Times that there was a "very high level of confidence... trending towards total certainty" that the PLA was responsible. Other sources told the publication that Chinese hackers probed the Pentagon system for months before the attacks, which forced the U.S. to take the network offline for more than a week. The Department of Defense downplayed the attack, but declined to point the finger at any one country or group. The attack on an unclassified e-mail network in the Office of the Secretary of Defense required that the systems be taken offline, spokesman Bryan Whitman acknowledged today, but backup networks kicked in. He would not confirm that China hackers were behind the assault, saying only that it's often difficult to pinpoint the origin of an intrusion into computer systems. But the Pentagon did not stand idly by, he said. "Cyber or non-kinetic type threats to military computer networks are viewed as just as real and just as significant as physical or kinetic threats," Whitman said in a statement. "The department aggressively responds to deter all intrusions to defend what is known as the GIG, the global information grid." Just a month before the attack, the Department of Defense had issued a report claiming that the PLA fieldsÂ first-strike cyberwarfareÂ units whose arsenals include computer viruses they might unleash on enemy networks. When the Pentagon released its annual report on the state of China's military strength in late May, Jiang, the same foreign ministry spokeswoman who blasted the story today, took exception to its overall tone, although she didn't mention cyberwarfare specifically. The U.S., she said then, "continues to spread myth of the 'China Threat' by exaggerating China's military strength and expenses out of ulterior motives." Last week, Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, raised the same issue during her visit to Beijing after the popular weekly Der Spiegel said systems at several government ministries, including Merkel's own office, had beenÂ infected with spywareÂ planted by Chinese hackers. In statements made during a press conference Aug. 27, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao called the reports of "grave concern" and promised that China would cooperate with Germany in its investigation. Today, Jiang seemed to echo Wen's comments. "The Chinese government has always opposed any Internet-wrecking crime, including hacking, and cracked down on it according to the law," she said. The Chinese military has been involved with hacking and viruses since at least the early 1990s, according to a 2000 paper written by Timothy Thomas of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. Coincidentally, the president of both China and the U.S. will face off this week in Australia during meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Hu Jintao, China's president, arrived in the country yesterday, while President George W. Bush arrived in Sydney today. Trade and climate change are expected to lead the agenda during the 21-country talks. Hu and Bush are scheduled to meet one-on-one during the conference. Â  Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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We'll need a whole bunch of expensive stuff Sources in Washington have indicated that the cyber attack last June which targeted the office of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was conducted by the Chinese military.â¦
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China has suffered &quot;massive&quot; losses of  state secrets through the Internet, a senior official said, as  China faces reports that it has raided the computer networks of  Western powers.
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Commies get nukes, sat-kill lasers, 'electromagnetic dominance' virus units A Pentagon report into Chinese military capability says that the People's Republic "is expanding from the traditional land, air, and sea dimensions of the modern battlefield to include space and cyber-space."â¦
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Governments are readying themselves for the Big One, a long-announced, long-awaited cyberwar of global proportions.
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Symantec surveyed security issues from bots to phishing and declared China's PCs the most infected.
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China is seeking to unseat the  United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, a U.S. Air  Force general leading a new push in this area said Wednesday.
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Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)  Beijing, 24 September: China successfully built the core network of its next generation Internet, leading the world in developing a larger, faster and safer Internet that is to dominate the future.
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Yellow Peril causes wet knickers among excited scribes Unnamed Pentagon figures continue to get big ink for their thesis that Chinese military cyber assault is a threat of trouser-moistening magnitude. Last week's media bandwagon, initiated after Financial Times hacks in Washington obligingly got things rolling, is now thundering along unstoppably as foaming tech-dunce scribes pile aboard.â¦
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Much ado about nothing France has become the fourth country to blame China for an upsurge in hacking attacks against government computers.â¦