3-26-18 Chinese cyber thefts have continued despite an agreement reached in 2015 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama to curtail government-sponsored cyber espionage.
The report concludes that in contravention of the agreement “the evidence indicates that China continues its policy and practice, spanning more than a decade, of using cyber intrusions to target US firms to access their sensitive commercial information and trade secrets.” Chinese cyber targeting has included harvesting sensitive corporate secrets from oil and gas companies.
China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, is aggressively engaged in the cyber economic espionage effort. For example, the PLA’s General Staff Third Department, known as 3PLA, operates Unit 61398, which was first revealed in 2013 as a major cyber information collector. The secret unit, located in an office building in Shanghai, is staffed by hundreds or perhaps thousands of cyber technicians.
The report notes that several private security companies have linked China to most of the thousands of cyber intrusions detected annually. 3PLA, for example, is linked to data stolen from at least 141 organizations around the world in 20 different business sectors, including aerospace, information technology, and satellites and telecommunications.
The report for the first time identifies five Chinese hackers indicted by a US federal grand jury in May 2014 as having been part of 3PLA’s Second Bureau, which directs Unit 61398. http://www.atimes.com/article/us-trade-report-lays-bare-chinese-government-cyber-espionage/
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3-13-18 Israel, or "Startup Nation" as some call it, has become a world leader in cyber security. And the nation's military is fueling its supremacy.
Although Israel makes no cars of its own, the world's top auto-security companies are all Israeli. The country also receives roughly one-fifth of the world's global private investment in cyber security. As independent and state-sponsored hackers wreak havoc, Israel continues to revolutionize its military and lead the way in the field.
To start, the Israeli Defense Force recruits the best and brightest coders and hackers as teens, to funnel them into their elite cyber warfare units. “Because going to the service is compulsory, you can look at the Israeli army as the largest HR organization in the world,” said Roni Zehavi, the CEO of CyberSpark, a government initiative that serves as an innovation incubator. https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/evmyda/how-israel-is-becoming-the-worlds-top-cyber-superpower
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7-13-17 The strategic logic of cyber has now shifted from restraint to one of disruption and constant harassment designed to signal capability and the threat of escalation. Russian hackers targeted U.S. institutions, most likely hoping to gain leverage before entering complex negotiations around sanctions, Ukraine and Syria.
While we have yet to witness the extremes of cyberwar, the more subtle danger since 2016 is the way states like Russia and North Korea use cyber-strategies as a form of political warfare. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/13/cyber-warfare-has-taken-a-new-turn-yes-its-time-to-worry/?utm_term=.dfff122ecd1d
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10-27-17 The FireEye study concluded that as early as 2014, around the time of the indictment of the PLA’s officers and hackers in the US for economic cyber theft, the Chinese government was modifying its approach to cyber operations. Central to this new posture is the previous decade’s scheme of informationization. The guiding doctrine, Local War Under Informationized Conditions, outlines the effort to develop a fully networked architecture capable of coordinating military operations on land, in air, at sea, in space and in cyber realms. The goal is to establish control of a rival’s information flow and maintain dominance in the early stages of a conflict....
The primary objective of the strategy is to deny an enemy access to information essential for continued combat operations, ideally before other forces engage in combat. A secondary objective is to attack people’s perception and belief systems through information deception and psychological attack. A third objective is strategic deterrence, which some Chinese military strategists see as comparable to nuclear weapons but possessing greater precision, leaving far fewer casualties and possessing longer range as most other weapons....
One of the major concerns of cyberespionage, besides loss of government and commercial secrets, is that it can be a frontrunner for cyberattacks. According to The New York Times, “What most worries American investigators is that the latest set of attacks believed coming from Unit 61398 focus not just on stealing information, but obtaining the ability to manipulate American critical infrastructure: the power grids and other utilities.”
Then-US President Obama discussed this point in this 2013 State of the Union speech. “We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets,” he said. “Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air-traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing.” ...
In an attempt to control its own cyberspace, China adopted a cybersecurity law to address growing threats of cyberattacks in addition to the Golden Shield Project, a major part of which is the notorious Great Firewall of China. The new cyber legislation took effect in June 2017 and is labeled an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said. The law might shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors deemed “critical” and include requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China. In 2016, Beijing adopted a sweeping national security law that aimed to make all key network infrastructure and information systems secure and controllable. “China’s government has come to recognize that cyberspace immediately and profoundly impacts on many if not all aspects of national security,” said Rogier Creemers, a Sinologist at Leiden University. “It is a national space, it is a space for military action, for important economic action, for criminal action and for espionage.” https://www.fairobserver.com/region/asia_pacific/china-cyberwarfare-cybersecurity-asia-pacific-news-analysis-04253/
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