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China Blamed For Attack On Australian Bureau of Meteorology (abc.net.au)
New submitter ElectronF sends news that officials within the Australian government are blaming China for an attack on computer systems at the Bureau of Meteorology. "The bureau owns one of Australia's largest supercomputers and provides critical information to a host of agencies. Its systems straddle the nation, including one link into the Department of Defence at Russell Offices in Canberra." China has denied involvement, saying, "We have stressed that cyber security needs to be based on mutual respect. We believe it is not constructive to make groundless accusations or speculation." The Bureau's systems are still fully operational, though officials say the breach will require significant investment to recover from.
To anyone who does information security, the fact that the Chinese government has the world's largest offensive infosec program is as obvious as the fact that the sun shines during the day time. Most attacks come from China, from behind the great firewall, with a large percentage of sophisticated attacks coming from IPs allocated to the Chinese military.
One particular facility is especially notable, it is a Chinese military installation that is listed as secret - its purpose is not published, a huge amount of attacks come from this facility, and they hire comp sci graduates. Now either ALL the compsci grads have had all of their computers controlled by Russian hackers for years and admins at this secret military facility haven't noticed gigabits of attacks constantly coming out of the facility, or they are the ones initiating the attacks.
It is not at all unusual for US networks to block all access from some very large IP ranges from China because these IPs have been a major, major source of attacks for -years-.
Speaking of government sources, if you speak infornally to the government people tasked with defense of US networks, chat with them in the smoking area by the loading dock, you'll find they are very afraid of what China is doing; the US is far outmatched in this area.
If you compare the US Navy vs China it is clear the US capability is far superior. For infosec (or"cyber"), it's the same but in reverse. You don't need top-secret clearance to see that the US Navy is the world's largest by far and the Chinese cyber command is by the world's largest.