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The UK thinks China is ready to wage cyberwar on British networks

British officials accused China of organized cyber-warfare against computer systems of banks and other large corporations located in the United Kingdom.  The head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5, Jonathan Evans, distributed a letter to more than 300 executives and security officers of large banks and major financial institutions.

Evans reportedly warned them "of the electronic espionage attack" by "Chinese state organizations."  Specifically, companies were warned of risks of the Chinese Army, which is known to use the Internet to steal personal information and other data.

"The letter acknowledges the strong economic and commercial reasons to do business with China, but the need to ensure management of the risks involved," warns a letter published on the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, where the report was originally published.

This is the first time London officials directly blamed China for conducting cyberwar.  Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced last week he has a scheduled visit to China in January, and talks of possible cyber-warfare may have to be added to the discussions.

Attacks initially started out as regular network probes, but quickly progressed towards "well-funded and well-organised operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage."

Officials in North America and several European nations have strongly criticized China for allegedly operating organized hacking rings aimed at infiltrating foreign networks.  Even though a direct military battle is unlikely, nations appear to be willing to feud with China through cyberspace.

China earlier in the year accused other nations, including the United States, of waging cyber-attacks against its computer networks.

British allegations come only a day after U.S. company McAfee published a scathing 22-page report that hacking arms races will become the next Cold War. While McAfee, a software security company, certainly has interests in future wars unfolding on its home turf, several global conflicts have already unfolded.

In May 2007, a three week campaign of denial of service and intrusion was detected against Estonian government computers.  The Estonian government publicly blamed Russia for the attacks.  Just three months later, another large-scale intrusion was detected in the Pentagon. U.S. officials put the blame on Chinese government hackers.

Intergovernmental hacking, it would seem, is on the rise; or at least are the means to detect such attacks.

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Friends or enemies?
By Misty Dingos on 12/2/2007 11:48:44 AM , Rating: 5
Why is China trying to attack our networks?
I thought they just wanted to be friends? I find all of this very confusing.
Does China want to our friends or our enemies?

If they want to be our enemy then we should treat them as such. Boycott the
Olympics. Isolate them from the global economy as effectively as we can.
Target there military installations with nuclear weapons. Note I did not say
attack them with nuclear weapons. Just target. Pressure them to change their
policies concerning repression of dissent in their country. Allow the use of
privateers to target vessels flying the ChiCom flag without reprisal. Shut down
any international air traffic in and out of China. Confiscate all Chinese
assets in the US and pressure Europe to do the same. If they want to try and
mess with our high tech infrastructure we should feel free to mess with them
economically also.

If a bully pushes you on the play ground the worst thing you can do is ignore
them. Push back. Hell break their nose. Bullies are only emboldened by
inaction.




RE: Friends or enemies?
By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 12/2/2007 11:53:41 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
Why is China trying to attack our networks?
I thought they just wanted to be friends? I find all of this very confusing.
Does China want to our friends or our enemies?

China is a big place. In many ways, much bigger than the U.S.

It would be unfair to claim that all of the U.S. wants to rain nuclear holocaust down on Tehran, yet when a few rednecks in the deep south proclaim it from the hillsides, people in Iran think the entire country feels that way.

The same could easily be said for China.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By dsx724 on 12/2/2007 1:04:47 PM , Rating: 5
Cyberwarfare is like playing monopoly where US has all the land. Much of the world's internet traffic is routed through the US. Most of the world's root DNS server clusters are in the US. We are the most prolific sponsors of cyberwarfare not to mention our intelligence agencies are bar none. Government officials only scream 'China' or 'Russia' to play politics and create irrational fears. It's the modern propoganda campaign for feeding people's fears to themselves in order to control the status quo in politics. Its the same as the bloated communist scare.

On the economic front, our economy would have stalled in the 1990's without China and the internet boom would have barely made up for it. Today, China owns 1.2 trillion dollars of US debt. If they were to sell them, the dollar would be worth 75 canadian cents. We're screwed both ways, just less so now than if we didn't embrace China.

With respect to human rights and democracy, there are cultural boundaries we're ignoring. We assume that the progression of developing nations should follow that of our own but time has proved that it doesn't work 9 out of 10 cases. The only true success is south korea from following the path we laid for them. Yet even they took a somewhat different approach.

I think people should stop thinking of countries as enemies or friends and start thinking of people as people. The only people that truely threaten the safety of the world are American politicians spreading ignorance. There's good and bad people everywhere and we shouldn't generalize. After all, we are the only nation to deliberately use the atomic bomb on a population, knowing full well the consequences.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 12/2/2007 1:18:31 PM , Rating: 1
Great post :)


RE: Friends or enemies?
By Clauzii on 12/2/2007 3:40:14 PM , Rating: 2
Can You give him a 6 please. VERY good post indeed :)


RE: Friends or enemies?
By ThisSpaceForRent on 12/3/2007 8:19:55 AM , Rating: 2
I agree, this was an excellent post. He offered a counter-point to the first poster, who also had an excellent post, without resorting to flaming, or ignorant bashing of anyone's opinions.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By mdogs444 on 12/2/2007 1:25:30 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
After all, we are the only nation to deliberately use the atomic bomb on a population, knowing full well the consequences.

Very true. However the ends justified the means, at the time. Very easy to put into question what happened so many years ago, but at the time, I think we'd be hard pressed to find many people who disagreed with the actions that took place. After all, thats partially, if not majorly, why the Japanese are not allowed an organized military.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By Ringold on 12/2/2007 2:16:09 PM , Rating: 5
Think we'd be hard pressed to find many people that disagreed at the time?

Hell, I dont disagree with it now. Landing troops would've cost the US hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more, lives, and beyond all doubt would've resulted in millions of Japanese deaths based on how they fought in Okinawa and other places.

Beyond the direct cost in human lives, its pretty certain that the entire Japanese society and traditional ways of life would've been completely and totally annihilated, one bloody yard at a time.

I don't know why leftists deny this or make a big deal out of it. If we could go back, we'd nuke 'em again, and again, and again. With 20/20 hindsight, perhaps if we'd firebombed other cities and left Tokyo alone until it was time to bring in 'the bomb', perhaps a single strike on a previously untouched Tokyo would've had the desired effect without need of a second. That's hard to say, though. What's not hard to say is that it was the best thing we could've possibly done, to use the nuclear option.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By mdogs444 on 12/2/2007 2:20:56 PM , Rating: 2
LOL - you and I are in complete agreement about all of that Ringold...as usual.

I just was trying to be a bit PC, and not offend anyone. But yeah, if it was up to me, I probably wouldnt have just stopped there.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By FITCamaro on 12/2/2007 2:26:14 PM , Rating: 2
We didn't just consider our casualties. We also considered theirs. Conventional warfare in Japan would have cost them millions of civilian lives. And yes their society and culture would have been destroyed.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By Noya on 12/3/07, Rating: -1
RE: Friends or enemies?
By mdogs444 on 12/3/2007 9:28:46 AM , Rating: 2
Yup - and over and over and over....why stop?


RE: Friends or enemies?
By FITCamaro on 12/3/2007 9:47:00 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah we'll just get back to standing behind our fence sipping a beer.

Seriously. At least have a f*cking argument. And anyone with a clue about how the Japanese fought during WW2 would make the decision consistently to nuke Japan. They weren't saying they'd have kept bombing them and bombing them just for the hell of it. Just that dropping the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified because in the end, it saved lives. More importantly American lives but also Japanese lives.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By rcc on 12/3/2007 1:13:14 PM , Rating: 2
I don't have a fence, a field, or a red neck, but sign me up too.

Not only did those strikes allow us to avoid the invasion of Japan, they also provided the world a shining example of why they should never be used again.

Without that example, would someone have been tempted to use them elsewhere on a wider scale sometime in the last 60 years?

File it under horrible, but necessary.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By OrSin on 12/3/2007 12:35:37 PM , Rating: 2
I'm harecore democrat and the truth is the Atomic and hydrogen bomb (we didnt have nucks then) saved millions of lives on both side. The thing is we only had 2 bombs and could not make more for at least 9 months. Thier was reason one was atomic and one had hydrogen. It becuase we didn't have the nuclear fuel for more then 1 of each. The bombs allow Japan to save face, and surennder. Remember even in the terms of surrender they never allowed any of the allies to step foot on thier land. As far as they are concerned they were defeated not concured.

Now for mondern day the use of the nucks is just dumb. But then it was the best out come we could have hope for, and even Japanese historian will tell you the same thing.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By rcc on 12/3/2007 1:35:44 PM , Rating: 2
Both of the nuclear devices detonated during WWII were first generation atomic weapons. Granted Fat Man was a more sophisticated device, but it was not a fusion( i.e. hydrogen) weapon.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By dsx724 on 12/2/2007 2:20:06 PM , Rating: 5
Thats exactly the point. Does the ends justify the means?

We failed to examine the consequences of our actions at the moment and seek the shortcut to victory. Its the case with Japan, Laos/Vietnam, Israel, Continent of Africa, and Iraq just to name a few. We don't consider it a problem until it bites us in the ass.

In Japan, the napalm fires from the bombs we dropped kill more people than the two nuclear bombs combined. However, few people know this outside of Japan. Also, I recalled the Pearl Harbor is a military target, therefore it was fair. They had the decency not to attack major cities on the West Coast. Our attacks illustrate our ignorance and hypocracy.

In Vietnam, we "assumed" indefinite health effects from Monsanto Agent Orange in the future was better than definite death during combat. So, we have hundreds of thousands of soldiers with terrible problems coming home that they must deal with for the rest of their lives. I'm not even considering the Loacians, Vietnamese and Korean victims.

By creating Israel in its very inconvinent location, we basically spawned the Israel-Arab conflict and made the middle east hate us despite our assistance fighting the Soviet.

Our aid to Africa included Monsanto products which created their dependence on us to this day. Yet we screw them over by subsidizing our farm industry to the tune of 25 billion dollars and sinking the prices so that Africa can't compete on the global farm market. This also screws with the global food markets and has been very contraversial and yet US media marginalizes it.

Before we entered Iraq, the main reason for poverty was because we sanctioned the country to death. Sanctions hurt the people more than their leaders. With their oil, they could be a very proment Arab state with stable government and good infrustructure. Instead, we went in and gave everyone a headache and an uncertain future.

Our lack of planning has left a path of destruction everywhere we went. We have been the nemesis of those we tried to help. Yet we continue to toss the good administrations and elect ones with many corporate ties. The American government is suppose to absorb the externalities of American corporations, not get in bed with it. Do our ends really justify our means?

I am sorry this is so far off topic but I rarely hear it said on DT so I thought I might as well give my perspective.


RE: Friends or enemies?
By Ringold on 12/2/2007 2:31:20 PM , Rating: 5
To use the word "deceny" in relation to anything the Japanese did in World War 2 is, in my book, almost a criminal act. At least Nazi forces killed some of their victims immediately. Japanese use of torture on both POWs and civilians was so atrocious as to make being a US POW in a German camp seem like a 5 star luxury resort.

The firebombing, while brutal, taken together with the nuclear strikes, allowed the Japanese military and Emperor (just barely) to surrender. If you bother to take a gander at the expected loss of life in the event of a US ground invasion, plus total devastation of probably everything not already destroyed, then you'd realize we did the best we possibly could. What would you of had us do, genius, surrender after our victory at Midway? :P

The others I wont necessarily disagree with, though you did manage to pick the weakest possible argument for Vietnam. Nevermind, you know, carpet bombing rice paddies and backing corrupt governments, or even getting involved in an internal social problem in the first place -- lets hate on Monsanto.