Know Your Enemy. Peter Brookes, a Senior Fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who writes often for the New York Post, wrote a bizarre column that appeared in the Post August 29th. In it, he plainly warns of a consistent course of hostile behavior by the government of Communist China designed to cripple the United States's computer networks:

Last year, the Department of Defense suffered a record 79,000 computer network attacks, including some that actually reduced the military's operational capabilities. In the past, top-flight military units such as the Army's 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the 4th Infantry Division have been "hacked."

According to Pentagon sources, most attacks on America's "digital" Achilles' Heel are originating from the People's Republic of China (PRC), making Chinese information warfare (IW) operations an issue we'd better pay close attention to.

"Most" of 79,000 attacks have been launched by Communist China? That means that Communist China attacked our computer networks a bedrock minimum of 39,501 times in one year, but we have done nothing about it. Quite the contrary, we are doing "business as usual" with our enemy!
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Brookes elaborates on China's malicious and warlike behavior against us:

China's military has incorporated cyberwarfare tactics into military exercises and created schools that specialize in IW. It's also hiring top computer-science graduates to develop its cyberwarfare capabilities and, literally, create an "army of hackers." * * *

Supporting these assertions, in 1999, two Chinese colonels published a book called "Unrestricted Warfare" that advocated "not fighting" the U.S. directly, but "understanding and employing the principle of asymmetry correctly to allow us [the Chinese] always to find and exploit an enemy's soft spots." * * *

Potential Chinese cyberattacks aren't limited to military targets. "Chinese military strategists envisage attacks on all American vulnerabilities, including civilian communications systems or on the vital nervous systems of our economic institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange's computer system," according to a July 2002 USCC [Congressional commission] report.

Those viruses you, your company, U.S. news networks have been attacked by? Some are almost certainly "Made in China".
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Brookes doesn't mention that China played a major part in creating Pakistan's nuclear weapons program; a Pakistani scientist has provided assistance to other countries, including North Korea, Libya, and possibly Iran; so China has, directly or indirectly, contributed to nuclear proliferation that endangers us as well.
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Grotesquely, after carefully laying out how Communist China is not only preparing for war against us but may actually be waging war against us already, Brookes, like the U.S. Government, ends up telling us not to worry. It's alrite to do business with the enemy, to ship hundreds of billions of dollars to Communist China and effectively finance their war against us!

China isn't necessarily America's next enemy, but its IW efforts/activities provide a cautionary tale to U.S. policymakers. Fortunately, both the government and the private sector have devoted significant resources to cybersecurity, including against terrorists and criminals.

Don't worry. Be happy. And continue to buy Chinese! We wouldn't want the People's 'Liberation' Army to run out of funds for its "army of hackers", now would we?
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"China isn't necessarily America's next enemy"? Quite so. It is our current enemy.
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Why hasn't President Wuss warned China, "We know what you're doing, and you must stop it immediately and permanently. If we detect any attempt by China to attack or hack or invade or snoop in any American computer, we will cut off all trade of every kind for a week for each and every such incident. You put enuf such incidents together, and we will have a permanent ban on all trade with China. Not only that, but once trade is completely cut off, we will start making as much trouble for China as we can. We will attack your computer networks. We will stir up trouble in Tibet and among non-Chinese minorities throughout China, but especially in fringe areas such as Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang. We'll base nuclear missiles in Taiwan. Remember the Soviet Union? How would you like the Chinese Empire to be broken up the way the Soviet Empire was? We can do it. Don't push us. You think "Two Chinas" is one too many? Maybe we think 10 Chinas isn't too many."
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That's what I'd say. But, alas, I'm not President.
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(Responsive to "The Art of (Cyber) War", August 29, 2005 column by Peter Brookes in the New York Post)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,907.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:25 PM