Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Chinese hackers behaving badly

NightWatch excerpts a summary of a congressional report on Chinese hacking of American computers: The Chinese cyberattackers — whoever they work for — sure are busy bees in cyberspace, according to the report of a Congressional hearing held in April by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was released last week.” The report ...

By , a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy.
584737_090618_hacking2.jpg
584737_090618_hacking2.jpg

NightWatch excerpts a summary of a congressional report on Chinese hacking of American computers:

The Chinese cyberattackers — whoever they work for — sure are busy bees in cyberspace, according to the report of a Congressional hearing held in April by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was released last week.” The report is dated 30 April.

A ‘… senior fellow at the Technolytics Institute, a cyber think tank, told the hearing that a survey of nonmilitary government outfits that monitor their Internet firewalls reported an average of 128 acts of “cyber aggression” a minute from China in March 2009.’

“That works out to 7,680 aggressive cyber acts an hour or 184,320 a day against non-Defense organizations. The senior fellow said all these attacks came from IP addresses in China but added that he did not know exactly who or what sits behind those IP addresses.'” 

Meanwhile, old Bill Gertz, who has made a full-time job of tracking Chinese misdeeds, passes along a report that a Chinese intrusion recently forced the FBI to shut down one of its computer networks. 

I wonder if the U.S. government has ever delivered a diplomatic note telling the Chinese government to knock it off. It just seems unfriendly to me, and not becoming a great power. Anyone know?

James Sarmiento/Flickr

Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1

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