China Says It Is the Target of US Hack Attacks 242
An anonymous reader writes "Officials at the Chinese Defense Ministry say hackers from the U.S. have been attacking Chinese military websites. 'The sites were subject to about 144,000 hacking attacks each month last year, two thirds of which came from the U.S., according to China's defense ministry. The issue of cyber hacking has strained relations between the two countries.' This follows recent hacks from people in China on high-profile U.S. sites, as well as a report accusing the Chinese government of supporting a hacking group. '[Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng] called on U.S. officials to "explain and clarify" what he said were recent U.S. media reports that Washington would carry out "pre-emptive" cyber attacks and expand its online warfare capabilities. Such efforts are "not conducive to the joint efforts of the international community to enhance network security," he said.'"
Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Who would have guessed the US was engaged in offensive cyber operations? [army.mil]
Ooooh Website attacks (Score:2, Informative)
While China continues to loot the US.
Re:About time. (Score:5, Informative)
About time. And preemptive my ass. China has been making state-orchestrated cyber attacks for years now. There's a war in cyberspace, did they just think the U.S. wouldn't show up?
So has the USA. More facets of the Stuxnet story are slowly being unearthed and it now appears the thing was already under intense development in 2005 [arstechnica.com]. It makes one wonder how widespread this kind of thing really is and how early the various intelligence services started doing it... Post 9/11? In the early 90s? Stuxnet was a pretty sophisticated piece of kit, especially in 2005. It makes these Chinese hack and snatch attacks look a bit crude. Stuxnet was only discovered when the spooks tried to make it 'more aggressive' to increase the infection rate and found out that it's really easy to make it too aggressive and when that happens and your spyware starts infecting civilian computers in large numbers you also blow the lid off the operation.
Re: Typical Political BS (Score:4, Informative)
Further, since we can't trust the media to actually dig into the actual truth on this or any issue, the Chinese likely will be successful in their efforts.