FoxNews.com Wrote:A Pentagon computer network was taken down for more than a week after the Chinese military hacked into it in June, the Financial Times reported Monday.
A computer system serving the office of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is believed to be the victim of the cyber attack. While the Pentagon would not say who may have orchestrated the plot, a senior official told the Financial Times that the People’s Liberation Army may have been the culprit.
It is not clear how much data was downloaded from the system, but a person with knowledge of the attack told the Financial Times that most of the information was probably “unclassified.”
President George W. Bush is expected to meet with Chinese president Hu Jintao this week before the Apec summit in Australia.
- Source: [here]
FoxNews.com Wrote:BEIJING — China on Tuesday denied a report that its military had hacked into Pentagon computers, saying the allegations were "groundless" and that Beijing was opposed to cybercrime.
The Financial Times, citing unnamed officials, reported Monday that the People's Liberation Army hacked into a computer system in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates in June. The attack forced officials to take down the network for more than a week, the report said.
"Some people make groundless accusations against China" that its military attacked the Pentagon, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular news briefing.
"China has all along been opposed to and forbids criminal activities undermining computer networks, including hacking," she said. "China is ready to strengthen cooperation with other countries, including the U.S., in countering Internet crimes."
The Financial Times report said the Pentagon was still investigating how much information was 'borrowed', but cited an unnamed person as saying that most of it was probably unclassified.
It was the second time in two weeks that China was accused of hacking into a foreign government's computers. On the eve of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to Beijing last week, the weekly Der Spiegel said computers at the Chancellery and three ministries had been infected with so-called Trojans, or spy programs.
The report, which did not specify its sources, said Germany's domestic intelligence agency believed a group of hackers associated with the People's Liberation Army might have been behind the alleged hacking.
At the time, Premier Wen Jiabao called the reported hacking a "matter of grave concern" and said China would take "firm and effective action" to prevent such crimes.
The Pentagon warned earlier this year that China's army is emphasizing hacking as an offensive weapon. It cited Chinese military exercises in 2005 that included hacking "primarily in first strikes against enemy networks."
The Associated Press reported in July that the State Department was trying to recover from large-scale network break-ins affecting operations worldwide. The hackers appeared to target the department headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, it was reported.
However, experts have said that China is home to a large number of insecure computers and networks that hackers in other countries could use to disguise their locations and launch attacks.
- Source: [here]
Discuss!
Do you think the Chinese military really hacked the Pentagon? Or just someone in china?
Chinese military PIII!! they are the sPa/\/\ guys!! they went to my forum more than 2000 times and some of them posted in chinese, CHINESE PIII
lol, Chinese Military hackers.
Hmmm... maybe they did.
perhaps it was normal people who snuck into the chinese military :P
lol @ them getting hacked
the communists r attacking
if it was the japanese now that would be a whole different story there wouldnt be anything left of the pentagons servers and firewall and poo poo
maybe it was team m33 trying to get secret scripts to make the ultimate psp or psp hack
lol @ultimate psp or psp hack
A more 'enlightened' write-up of what happened;
Quote:original source The Register
Sources in Washington have indicated that the cyber attack last June which targeted the office of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was conducted by the Chinese military.
According to a report in the London Financial Times, "senior US officials" and "persons familiar with the event" have briefed that there is a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” within the Pentagon that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) carried out the June attack. That was seen as a particularly significant event, apparently, as it involved disruption of networks as well as passive snooping.
The FT quoted a former official as saying that:
“The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system...and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale.”
The US military has long warned of a rising cyber-warfare capability in the PLA, releasing a report earlier this year that China "is expanding from the traditional land, air, and sea dimensions of the modern battlefield to include space and cyber-space".
The document said that the inscrutable commies are also developing an "information warfare" force capable of "computer network attack," to achieve "electromagnetic dominance".
America has been far from idle in rising to meet this challenge; indeed there has been something of a scramble among the US military to gets its cyber boots on. The US Air Force has been particularly active, forming up a Cyber Command that may, in the future, be manned up at least in part by career net-combat specialists.
Quite apart from cyberspace, confrontation with China is one of the few justifications for much of America's huge panoply of ultra-high-tech air, maritime and perhaps space weaponry. This is stuff that many in the Pentagon love and believe in passionately, but which is occasionally threatened by the basic counter-insurgency wars the US is currently fighting. Huge amounts of money are being spent on things including armoured trucks, which could have gone on satellite-busters or energy weapons or something.
So leaks out of the Pentagon that big up China as a threat always need to be taken with a pinch of salt. It's a certainty that the PLA probes US networks, just as the US does Chinese ones. It's very likely that China is prepping some naughty network tricks for use in the event of a serious scuffle with America - and again, this will not be a one-sided effort.
But China doesn't want to fight the US - who would pay for all the iPods? And America doesn't really want to fight China - where would they get all the damn iPods made?
If the PLA really did shut down Robert Gates's unclassified email, it was a schoolboy error to show their hands so early. All they have achieved - if it was them - is give their adversaries ammo to use in demanding more resources to fight them with. And it seems exceptionally sloppy to get traced back, when it would be simplicity itself for government hats* to operate out of third countries.
But nobody's saying the PLA are all that clever, so it may well have been them. If it was, though, they evidently aren't as fiendishly cunning as all that.
FT writeup here.®
*Whitehat if you're Chinese, blackhat if American. Govhats? Redstarhats? Milhats? Spookhats?