According to FBI reports, China has created an army of 180,000 cyberspies who have carried out nearly 100,000 cyber attacks against the US Department of Defense network alone. And all that was already happening in 2010.
In 2013, China also staged an avalanche of cyberattacks against systems vital to the US government. This has led to thefts of blueprints and of defense technology as critical as an advanced Patriot missile system known as the PAC-3.
This information is tactically important for China: in the event of a confrontation, it will have key data on the operation and weaknesses of the enemy arsenal. But it is also a precious intellectual resource : the research and development costs are for the United States, but China must simply pay for strategies that allow it to appropriate all this information that has cost so much time and money to develop.
Proof of this is Titan Rain , the name given by the US government to a series of coordinated attacks against US computer systems for espionage purposes against companies such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratory, Redstone Arsenal and NASA.
In August 2016, a hitherto unknown hacking group called Shadow Brokers claimed to have pioneered access to the United States National Security Agency (NSA). According to a Pentagon report, the Chinese military has a “high level of cyber intrusion and does not hesitate to degrade the main operational and technological advantages of the United States.”
Still, China’s military interests are just the tip of the iceberg of everything it gets from this cyberwar. The theft of intellectual property of all kinds of technology has provided the Asian country with an immeasurable transfer of material and intellectual wealth, calculated by some analysts as the highest in its history.
GhostNet (“Ghost Network” in English) was a network that, in 2009, had managed to infiltrate at least 1,295 terminals in 103 countries around the world. Although there is no conclusive evidence that the Chinese government was involved in the operation, the origin of the activity was mainly concentrated in the People’s Republic of China.
This immense cyber espionage network spread malware ( malicious software ) to previously selected recipients from the user’s contact list, through a Trojan attached to the emails sent, which allowed to compromise the Tibetan government in exile and even the Dalai himself. Lama . Other compromised systems were discovered in embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.
China has also been accused of hacking the media, such as the operation that took place in the New York Times in early 2013. In this way, an attempt was made to discover the sources and contacts that had provided sensitive information to the newspaper about the Chinese prime minister. , Wen Jiabao . The cyber attack was linked to a unit of the People’s Liberation Army occupying a 12-story building in Shanghai, where thousands of employees dedicated to spying on governments, companies and individuals worked.
So it should come as no surprise that 41% of all cyber attacks that occur in the world originate in China , according to the State of Internet , the report from the leading content delivery network service provider, Akamai. The economic and tariff tension between the United States and China has possibly increased this percentage of cyber warfare, at least between the two nations.
For its part, the Chinese government has always denied any relationship to most of these cyberattacks, stating that China “strictly prohibits any computer crime.”
