Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

Disturbing news from ComputerWorld. China is gearing up for “cyber warfare” while the United States blindly favors China with “Most Favored Nation” status, pandering to its Communist oppressive government, and free trade of endless toxic crap from the country…. unbelievable.

Looking to gain the upper hand in any future cyber conflicts, China is probably spying on U.S. companies and government, according to a report commissioned by a Congressional advisory panel monitoring the security implications of trade with China.

The report outlines the state of China’s hacking and cyber warfare capabilities, concluding that “China is likely using its maturing computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. government and industry by conducting a long term, sophisticated computer network exploitation campaign.”

Published Thursday, the report was written by Northrop Grumman analysts commissioned by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Government agencies and military contractors have been hit with targeted, well-crafted attacks for years now, many of which appear to have originated in China. But this report describes in detail how many of these attacks play out, including an attack that exploited an unpatched flaw in Adobe Acrobat that was patched earlier this year.

Citing U.S. Air Force data from 2007, the report says at least 10TB to 20TB of sensitive data has been siphoned from U.S. government networks as part of a “long term, persistent campaign to collect sensitive but unclassified information.” Some of this information is used to create very targeted and credible phishing messages that then lead to the compromise of even more computers.

…The report describes sophisticated, methodical techniques and speculates on possible connections between Chinese government agencies and the country’s hacker community, increasingly a source of previously unknown “zero-day” computer attacks.

“Little evidence exists in open sources to establish firm ties between the [People's Liberation Army] and China’s hacker community, however, research did uncover limited cases of apparent collaboration between more elite individual hackers and the [People's Republic of China's] civilian security services,” the report says.

I remain totally baffled that the U.S. STILL maintains this one-sided relationship. In more realistic days, such activities would have been called for declarations of war. Our pink-puffy politicians just rake in the donations while they rip us off and sell us out! When will our coddling of China end?