Counteracting Our Edge
by ilene - January 15th, 2010 12:56 am
Counteracting Our Edge
Courtesy of Michael Panzner at When Giants Fall
Many of those who pooh-pooh the notion that America’s role in the world is in any way vulnerable often make reference to our superior military technology. But as The Daily Beast‘s chief investigative reporter, Gerald Posner, writes in "China’s Secret Cyberterrorism," one of our prospective rivals has made great strides in its efforts to counteract that advantage:
While Google weighs exiting China, a classified FBI report says that country has already developed a massive cyber army attacking the U.S. with “WMD-like” destruction capabilities.
A classified FBI report indicates that China has secretly developed an army of 180,000 cyberspies that “poses the largest single threat to the United States for cyberterrorism and has the potential to destroy vital infrastructure, interrupt banking and commerce, and compromise sensitive military and defense databases."
These spies are already launching 90,000 attacks a year just against U.S. Defense Department computers, according to a senior FBI analyst familiar with the contents of the report, making news Tuesday that the Chinese government may have hacked the email accountings of human-rights activists, prompting Google to consider withdrawing from that country, seem like child’s play.
The FBI report estimates that the Chinese Army has developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese military cyberspies, plus 150,000 private-sector computer experts, whose mission is to steal American military and technological secrets.
Cyber warfare is part of every developed country’s 21st century arsenal. Although no U.S. official will admit it, the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA regularly probe and try to hack into China’s military and industrial computer networks to obtain the information that years ago were brought back by the James Bonds of spy services. The U.S., and many of our European allies, try to find ways to wreck some havoc in the Chinese computer grid if a conflict ever takes place. The difference is that the Chinese are better than anyone else and lead the way in technological breakthroughs for the cyber battlefield. The FBI report concludes that a massive Chinese cyberattack could “be in the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction," says the analyst, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it, adding that it would do substantial damage to the American economy, telecommunications, electric power grid, and military preparedness.
The FBI
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site