Experts believe China has gained an upper hand over America in cyber espionage.
As America and China grow more economically and financially intertwined, the two nations have also stepped up spying on each other. Today, most of that is done electronically, with computers rather than listening devices in chandeliers or human moles in tuxedos.
And at the moment, many experts believe China may have gained the upper hand. Though it is difficult to ascertain the true extent of America's own capabilities and activities in this arena, a series of secret diplomatic cables as well as interviews with experts suggest that when it comes to cyber-espionage, China has leaped ahead of the US.
According to US investigators, China has stolen terabytes of sensitive data — from usernames and passwords for State Department computers to designs for multi-billion dollar weapons systems. And Chinese hackers show no signs of letting up. “The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating,” says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC.
Secret US state department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to Reuters, trace systems breaches — code-named “Byzantine Hades” by US investigators — to the Chinese military. An April 2009, cable even pinpoints the attacks to a specific unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Privately, US officials have long suspected that the Chinese government and the military was behind the cyber-attacks. What was never disclosed publicly, until now, was evidence.
US efforts to halt Byzantine Hades hacks are ongoing, according to sources. In the April 2009 cable, officials in the State Department’s Cyber Threat Analysis Division noted that several Chinese-registered web sites were “involved in Byzantine Hades intrusion activity in 2006.”
The sites were registered in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in central China, according to the cable. A person named Chen Xingpeng set up the sites using the “precise” postal code in Chengdu used by the People’s Liberation Army Chengdu Province First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau (TRB), an electronic espionage unit of the Chinese military. The precise relationship with the Chinese Army of suspected hacker Chen Xingpeng could not be immediately determined by Reuters.
But the leaked cables and other US government reports underscore how Chinese and other state-sponsored and private hackers have overwhelmed US government computer networks. In the last five years, cyber-intrusions reported to the US Computer Emergency Response Team, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, have increased more than 650 per cent, from 5,503 incidents in fiscal 2006 to 41,776 four years later, according to a March 16 report by the Government Accountability Office.
