China's Cyber Espionage Ambitions

Must have been slow news week, so slow that all of a sudden Germany, the U.K, France, New Zealand, and the U.S got hacked by China's cyber spies. "Poor China" not just denied, but also admitted of getting hacked by supposedly one of the countries that started the alligations. Pretty much all the news articles basically enjoying the media-echo effect exclude the reality as an issue, namely that each of the country that's blaming China for cyber espionage, has been developing its own offensive cyber warfare capabilities for years. Some of the good examples to illustrate the diverse topic are for instance, North Korea's Cyber Warfare Unit 121 that was originally started in order for North Korea to balance its lack of conventional weaponry capabilities by improving its asymmetric warfare ones, passive cyber espionage in the form of gathering OSINT Through Botnets, releasing DIY attack tools in times of hacktivism tensions, or the healthy paranoia posed by the fear of now Chinese owned Lenovo could be implementing hardware backdoors in between China's recent interest in buying Seagate Technology fueling the tensions even further.

In a nation2nation cyber warfare scenario, the country that's relying on and empowering its citizens with cyber warfare or CYBERINT capabilities, will win over the country that's dedicating special units for both defensive and offensive activities, something China's that's been copying attitude from the U.S military thinkers, is already envisioning :

"It also put forward the concept of a "people's information war" for the first time, describing this as a form of national non-symmetric warfare, with the people at the core, computers as the weapons, knowledge as the ammunition and the enemy's information network as the battlefield. These experts believe that ordinary people can be mobilized to provide global information support, spread global propaganda and conduct global psychological warfare. Such attacks could be launched from anywhere in the world at the enemy's military, political and economic information systems. If necessary, the experts suggested, computers currently under the control of Chinese enterprises could be dispersed among the people and connected to volunteer Web portals around the world, which would become a combined strategic cyber attack force. The article concluded by emphasizing that training "hacker warriors" should be a priority within the Chinese military."

All warfare is indeed based on deception. Go thought a related post on the The Biggest Military Hacks of All Time as well, and if objectivity is important to you, ask yourself the following, or question the lack of its answer within an article stating a country did something :

Was it the NSANet, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System [JWICS], the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET), or the Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) actually breached?

Cover courtesy of Der Spiegel.