News Analysis
In Cyberspace, New Cold War
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: February 24, 2013 New York Times
WASHINGTON — When the Obama administration circulated to the nation’s Internet providers last week a lengthy confidential list of computer addresses linked to a hacking group that has stolen terabytes of data from American corporations, it left out one crucial fact: that nearly every one of
the digital addresses could be traced to the neighborhood in Shanghai that is headquarters to the Chinese military’s cybercommand.
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| A building that houses a Chinese military unit on the outskirts of Shanghai, believed to be the source of hacking attacks. |
That deliberate omission underscored the heightened sensitivities inside the Obama administration over just how directly to confront China’s untested new leadership over the hacking issue, as the administration escalates demands that China halt the state-sponsored attacks that Beijing insists it is not mounting.
The issue illustrates how different the worsening cyber-cold war between the world’s two largest economies is from the more familiar superpower conflicts of past decades — in some ways less dangerous, in others more complex and pernicious.
Administration officials say they are now more willing than before to call out the Chinese directly — as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did last week in announcing a new strategy to combat theft of intellectual property. But President Obama avoided mentioning China by name — or Russia or
Iran, the other two countries the president worries most about — when he declared in his State of the Union address that “we know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.” He added: “Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial
institutions and our air traffic control systems.”
Defining “enemies” in this case is not always an easy task. China is not an outright foe of the United States, the way the Soviet Union once was; rather, China is both an economic competitor and a crucial supplier and customer. The two countries traded $425 billion in goods last year, and China
remains, despite many diplomatic tensions, a critical financier of American debt. As Hillary Rodham Clinton put it to Australia’s prime minister in 2009 on her way to visit China for the first time as secretary of state, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”
In the case of the evidence that the People’s Liberation Army is probably the force behind “Comment Crew,” the biggest of roughly 20 hacking groups that American intelligence agencies follow, the answer is that the United States is being highly circumspect. Administration officials were perfectly
happy to have Mandiant, a private security firm, issue the report tracing the cyberattacks to the door of China’s cybercommand; American officials said privately that they had no problems with Mandiant’s conclusions, but they did not want to say so on the record.
That explains why China went unmentioned as the location of the suspect servers in the warning to Internet providers. “We were told that directly embarrassing the Chinese would backfire,” one intelligence official said. “It would only make them more defensive, and more nationalistic.”
That view is beginning to change, though. On the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was asked whether he believed that the Chinese military and civilian government were behind the economic espionage. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he replied.
In the next few months, American officials say, there will be many private warnings delivered by Washington to Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, who will soon assume China’s presidency. Both Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mrs. Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, have trips to China in the offing. Those private conversations are expected to make a case that the sheer size and sophistication of the attacks over the past few years threaten to erode support for China among the country’s biggest allies in Washington, the American business community.
“America’s biggest global firms have been ballast in the relationship” with China, said Kurt M. Campbell, who recently resigned as assistant secretary of state for East Asia to start a consulting firm, the Asia Group, to manage the prickly commercial relationships. “And now they are the ones telling the Chinese that these pernicious attacks are undermining what has been built up over decades.”
It is too early to tell whether that appeal to China’s self-interest is getting through. Similar arguments have been tried before, yet when one of China’s most senior military leaders visited the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon in May 2011, he said he didn’t know much about cyberweapons — and
said the P.L.A. does not use them. In that regard, he sounded a bit like the Obama administration, which has never discussed America’s own cyberarsenal.
Yet the P.LA.’s attacks are largely at commercial targets. It has an interest in trade secrets like aerospace designs and wind-energy product schematics: the army is deeply invested in Chinese industry and is always seeking a competitive advantage. And so far the attacks have been cost-free.
American officials say that must change. But the prescriptions for what to do vary greatly — from calm negotiation to economic sanctions and talk of counterattacks led by the American military’s Cyber Command, the unit that was deeply involved in the American and Israeli cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants.
“The problem so far is that we have rhetoric and we have Cyber Command, and not much in between,” said Chris Johnson, a 20-year veteran of the C.I.A. team that analyzed the Chinese leadership. “That’s what makes this so difficult. It’s easy for the Chinese to deny it’s happening, to say it’s someone else, and no one wants the U.S. government launching counterattacks.”
That marks another major difference from the dynamic of the American-Soviet nuclear rivalry. In cold war days, deterrence was straightforward: any attack would result in a devastating counterattack, at a human cost so horrific that neither side pulled the trigger, even during close calls like the
Cuban missile crisis.
But cyberattacks are another matter. The vast majority have taken the form of criminal theft, not destruction. It often takes weeks or months to pin down where an attack originated, because attacks are generally routed through computer servers elsewhere to obscure their source. A series of attacks on The New York Times that originated in China, for example, was mounted through the computer systems of unwitting American universities. That is why David Rothkopf, the author of books about the National Security Council, wrote last week that this was a “cool war,” not only because of the remote nature of the attacks but because “it can be conducted indefinitely — permanently, even — without triggering a shooting war. At least, that is the theory.”
Administration officials like Robert Hormats, the under secretary of state for business and economic affairs, say the key to success in combating cyberattacks is to emphasize to the Chinese authorities that the attacks will harm their hopes for economic growth. “We have to make it clear,” Mr.
Hormats said, “that the Chinese are not going to get what they desire,” which he said was “investment from the cream of our technology companies, unless they quickly get this problem under control.”
But Mr. Rogers of the Intelligence Committee argues for a more confrontational approach, including “indicting bad actors” and denying visas to anyone believed to be involved in cyberattacks, as well as their families.
The coming debate is over whether the government should get into the business of retaliation. Already, Washington is awash in conferences that talk about “escalation dominance” and “extended deterrence,” all terminology drawn from the cold war.
Some of the talk is overheated, fueled by a growing cybersecurity industry and the development of offensive cyberweapons, even though the American government has never acknowledged using them, even in the Stuxnet attacks on Iran. But there is a serious, behind-the-scenes discussion about what
kind of attack on American infrastructure — something the Chinese hacking groups have not seriously attempted — could provoke a president to order a counterattack.
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China worried about cyber security: FM spokeswoman
(Xinhua)20:46, February 25, 2013 BEIJING, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) --
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Monday that the Chinese government is worried about recent negative developments in cyber security.
Spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the remarks at a regular press briefing in response to a question regarding an alleged Chinese cyber attack directed at Germany.
Hua said some countries have treated cyberspace as a new battlefield, justifying their efforts to build up their own cyber arsenals by making their own rules for how cyberspace should be treated.
Hua said these activities have increased the risk for a potential conflict.
She said the cyber espionage conducted by some countries represents an attempt to divert attention from real problems and will not help to create a cooperative international atmosphere.
"China has cooperated in the areas of cyber security and law enforcement with 30 countries, including Britain, Germany and Russia. It has developed an overall mechanism for fighting cyber crime and hacker attacks," she said, adding that China hopes relevant parties will stop lodging accusations and work together to safeguard cyberspace security.
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US accusations harmful to build safe cyber world
(People's Daily Online)11:05, November 21, 2012
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Committee affiliated to U.S. Congress issued its annual report on Nov. 14, declaring that China has become the most threatening country in the cyber world. This is not the first irresponsible report issued by the Committee.
China is opposed to any form of hacker attacks and has set up relevant laws to prohibit it.
With the rapid development of Internet in China in recent years, China has suffered more and more attacks from hackers overseas.
According to sample monitoring of National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (CNCERT), about 47,000 foreign IP addresses as Trojan or botnet control server had broken into nearly 8.9 million computers in China in 2011.
In the foreign attacks suffered by China network, the malicious IP addresses from the United States are the most serious threat.
The CNCERT found through survey that about 9,500 U.S. IPs had controlled nearly 8.8 million computers of China in 2011 and 72 percent of IPs pretending to be Chinese banks were from the United States.
Although these data showed the conditions of U.S. cyber-attacks suffered by China from a technological point of view, China never made any simple assumptions and accusations to the source of attacks.
This is because, determined by the openness of the Internet, it cannot be deduced whether the attack has been launched by American hackers merely because the IP addresses of the attack source are in the United States.
China has been participating in the exchanges and cooperation in a constructive way in the field of global network security. In the fight against cybercrime, China has also been carrying out fruitful cooperation with many countries including the United States.
Unfortunately, the United States has always held a negative attitude toward the initiative for the prevention of network warfare and the development of relevant international rules while vigorously developing its network attacking capabilities.
Information security has become a global issue and the counter actions against hackers are inseparable from international cooperation. The misleading report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission cannot solve any problems; dialogue and cooperation is the only correct way of dealing with network security and other global challenges.
New Delhi, Feb 27: After being put under house arrest here for nearly three weeks, Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani was released as Delhi Police withdrew its personnel from his South Delhi home this evening.
