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Cyber war – China’s advanced espionage

It’s global cyber war out there, Financial Review. CHRISTOPHER JOYE
02 JAN 2013“…..Since 2003 the Chinese have executed advanced
cyber-espionage operations against the West, including Australia,
stealing hundreds of billions worth of business and military secrets
in what United States officials say is “the greatest transfer of
wealth in history”.

The Chinese were fingered in the hacking of Barack Obama’s and John
McCain’s computers in the 2008 US presidential election campaign. In
2011 they allegedly penetrated the parliamentary email systems of 10
Australian federal ministers, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard,
and compromised emails belonging to the European Union President and
his advisers……..

“Electronic intelligence gathering is being used against Australia on
a massive scale to extract confidential information from governments,
the private sector and ordinary individuals,” he says.

“It is used to steal intellectual property, all kinds of defence
secrets, weapons designs, and commercially advantageous information.
The security threat presented by the exploitation … of the cyber
world is both pervasive and insidious. It is ubiquitous and is enabled
by what we would normally expect to be a great social and economic
good – technological advance.”

The head of Britain’s counter-intelligence agency, MI5, describes the
extent to which online vulnerabilities are being “aggressively
exploited” as “astonishing” and aided by “‘industrial-scale’ processes
involving many thousands of people lying behind state-sponsored cyber
espionage.”

In 2012 US President Obama warned that the “cyber threat is one of the
most serious economic and national security challenges we face”.

US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta characterises the cyber arena as
the “battlefield of the future, where adversaries can seek to do harm
to our country, our economy, and our citizens”.

Panetta says the US reserves the right to pre-emptively cauterise
cyber menaces with force and/or through its arsenal of digital
weapons, which have been privately listed for the first time. The
founder of one of the world’s biggest computer security firms, Russian
billionaire Eugene Kaspersky, says “more and more states are investing
in a dangerous new cyber arms race”. And he thinks in the next decade
“cyber espionage, data theft, and targeted attacks will become
standard problems for most private enterprises.”…
http://afr.com/f/free/national/it_global_cyber_war_out_there_94da3CY7Avufi9jp5d0JTI

January 8, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | China, secrets,lies and civil liberties