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China Aims To Narrow Cyberwarfare Gap With US (zdnet.com)
According to the Department of Defense, China is looking to narrow the gap with the U.S. in terms of cyberwarfare capabilities. "The Pentagon report said that in recent years the Chinese army has emphasized the importance of cyberspace for national security because of the country's increasing reliance on its digital economy," reports ZDNet. "It said Chinese military strategists see cyber operations as a low-cost deterrent that can demonstrate capabilities and challenge an adversary." From the report: The DoD's annual report to congress (PDF) points to a Chinese international cyberspace cooperation strategy in March 2017, which called for the expedited development of a military "cyber force" as an important aspect of the country's defense strategy. However, the U.S. report said that China also believes its cyber capabilities and personnel lag behind those of the U.S. and that China "is working to improve training and bolster domestic innovation to overcome these perceived deficiencies and advance cyberspace operations."
The report lists "cyber activities" directed against the DoD by China and said: "Computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, continued to be targeted by China-based intrusions through 2017." It said these intrusions focused on accessing networks and extracting information, and said China uses its cyber capabilities to support intelligence collection against U.S. diplomatic, economic, academic, and defense sectors.
The report lists "cyber activities" directed against the DoD by China and said: "Computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, continued to be targeted by China-based intrusions through 2017." It said these intrusions focused on accessing networks and extracting information, and said China uses its cyber capabilities to support intelligence collection against U.S. diplomatic, economic, academic, and defense sectors.
And make the Chinese pay for it!
Stop using systems that are based on ambient authority to get work done, and this problem goes away... we figured this out in the 1970s, but seem to have forgotten that lesson.
It is possible to build systems that are much, much harder to hack, thus making herd immunity high enough that worms and virii won't spread, no matter how clever.
10 more years until people wake up enough to take action.
Yeah there is no gap to be narrowed. China has infiltrated most major American companies and I have been part of dealing with that for one of the biggest. APT 27? Yeah, I know them.. there are more.
All this shit is down to US contractors, treaties bad, not profit for doing worthless shit. No attempt to prevent this issue, just insane greed driven demands by US tech corporations to accelerate this to internet collapse and that is where it is going, billions wasted to eventually collapse digital communications because more fucking profit for the war industrial complex contractors. The most insane faction, in the factionalised US system of corporate controlled government governance, each group of corporations looking to suck as much out of the treasury as possible whilst of course paying zero taxes.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The story is not very well written. Should I cite the best book I've read on the topic? I bet no one cares within the context of today's Slashdot.
Anyway, the story is obviously about offensive capabilities, where the Chinese have lagged behind. Amusingly enough, a lot of that is because of the language problems, mostly the human languages, but also the computer languages, especially as related to the inaccessible source code. Right now it seems clear that the leaders in offense for cyber-war are the Russians.
On the defensive side, the Chinese are probably the leaders. They have the Great Firewall of China as a fairly serious line of defense and they think (and have always thought) in terms of partitioning and isolating and controlling their networks. Not just the computers, but the human networks, too. However it is probably more important that their society is less dependent upon computers and therefore less vulnerable to cyber-warfare attacks.
America is supposed to be one of the leaders in offensive capabilities, but the weaknesses on the defensive side are overwhelming. Almost no defenses and high vulnerability. Only tiny traces of defensive thinking.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Cyber warfare has the potential be extremely destructive - collapsing economies, destroying means of production, destroying critical information, etc - and that is without the possibility of direct damage. I don't see cyber warfare as necessarily a step down in damage potential from conventional weapons, it may be a step up. Meanwhile various nations seem to feel free to launch cyber attacks, on other countries nuclear facilities, election systems and critical infrastructure, without any sort of declaration of war. Cyber weapons seem completely ungoverned by international rules of war.
Its a type of conflict that could escalate very quickly, and which could cause so much damage to a country that a conventional or possibly even nuclear reprisal might seem warranted.
"Rules of war" may seem pointless, but they have at least helped over the last century. There has been limited use of gas, at least by the major powers, no use of nuclear after WWII, no large scale bio weapons attacks etc . They don't prevent violations, but they help clarify what sort of responses might be expected after various types of cyber attacks