Pentagon Ups Hacking Accusations Against China

wiredmikey writes "A new report from the Pentagon marked the most explicit statement yet from the United States that it believes China's cyber espionage is focused on the U.S. government, as well as American corporations. China kept up a steady campaign of hacking in 2012 that included attempts to target U.S. government computer networks, which could provide Beijing a better insight into America's policy deliberations and military capabilities, according to the Pentagon's annual assessment of China's military. 'China is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs,' said the report to Congress (PDF). The digital espionage was part of a broader industrial espionage effort that seeks to secure military-related U.S. and Western technology, allowing Beijing to scale back its reliance on foreign arms manufacturers, the report said. One day later, Beijing dismissed the Pentagon's report that accused it of widespread cyberspying on the U.S. government, rejecting it as an 'irresponsible' attempt to drum up fear of China as a military threat."

Comments

Surprising?

[venom85]

Is this supposed to surprise anyone? And, more importantly, does anyone out there actually believe that the US isn't doing the same thing toward [insert long list of nations here]? I, for one, certainly believe they are.

Government morons - just fix the problem

[Indy1]

Null route all the Chinese networks, problem solved. Worked great on my mail server, amount of spam I got dropped massively.

Re:proof not speculation

[admdrew]

why does it *have* to be china that's doing the attacking?

The type of analysis used to reach this conclusion includes far more information than source IPs. Based on the wealth of attack data available to even some of the smallest security providers, it's not tough to eventually paint a pretty good picture of China (their military, especially) as a core of generally nefarious network activity. A single IP isn't enough to place blame, but billions of packets over years of activity are definitely enough to attribute a significant volume of the world's hacking directly to the Chinese.

Source: I do a significant amount of network traffic analysis specifically for security.