Is China really hacking the United States?

Jon Rajewski computer exploitation

A very nice article was written by Jermey Page of the Wall Street Journal about China and its US website attacks.  Some excerpts from the article that I felt were interesting:
A rare example of an official source contradicting China’a repeated assertions that it doesn’t engage in cyberattacks……

At one point, as a narrator discusses various forms of cyberattack, a cursor is shown moving on a computer screen with a software application that is identified in Chinese characters as a “distributed denial-of-service” attack. Also known as DDOS, such attacks are relatively unsophisticated tools of cyberwarfare that involve bombarding websites with data to disable them.
The next screen says at the top, in Chinese, “Attack system..PLA Electronic Engineering Institute.” PLA stands for People’s Liberation Army.

The “Official source” referenced above can be viewed in this video



I love to use current topics in my classes to help reinforce concepts. In my CyberCrime class last year,  I lectured on Operation Aurora (Google Hack of 2009) and highlighted the report Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation which was prepared for the US-Chain Economic and Security Review Commission authored by Northrop Grumman. If you read the entire report, which I highly recommend, you will find that Northrop was spot on – back in 2009 – about what was reported in the above referenced Page’s August 2011 article.