Why China's Cyber Espionage Is A Threat

When considering the technological advances over the past 50 years, the Internet has undoubtedly had the greatest impact on everyday life of developed economies and its citizens. The world has become smaller, societies interconnected, and the pace of global integration dramatically increased since the introduction of the Internet. With the world connected, cyber actors represent a very real and often underestimated threat to the United States’ ability to defend national security, protect industrial innovation, and secure privacy information. As a result of globalization, the foreign cyber actors represent the most imminent threat to national security, corporate innovation, and citizen privacy rights.

In a documentary by Admiral Vern (2002), “the events of September 11, 2001 tragically illustrated that the promise of peace and security in the 21st Century is fraught with profound dangers”. The US foreign policies and interest in key geographic regions of the world sparks controversies resulting in state funded cyber attacks, cyber espionage and terrorism against the United States and its allied nations. When several attempts to cripple the United States and its allied nations through negotiations failed, enemy states and nefarious groups have shifted their focus to cyber attacks and cyber espionage. According to Gady (2016), “China continues cyber espionage against the United States”. Drezner (2014), “Washington and Beijing hardly agree on everything, but they agree on the big things, like maintaining an open global economy, reducing the likelihood of a military confrontation, and tackling climate change”.

China is responsible for cyber espionage against the U.S. resulting in significant damage to the U.S. economy. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property found that, China is responsible for up to 70% of incurred losses of the U.S. (Navarro 2016). The Center for Strategic and

Pfleeger, S. Pfleeger, and Margulies (2015) outline possible examples of cyber warfare between Canada and China (p. 844). According to Pfleeger, S. Pfleeger, and Margulies (2015), “the Canadian government revealed that several of its national departments had been victims of a cyber attack…” (p. 844). Eventually, the attack was unofficially traced to a computer in China (p. 844). Cyber warfare can be used negatively and positively. It is evident that China was seeking to gain protected information form Canada. Although a purpose of cyber warfare, it is not a conventional way of obtaining information. Additionally, cyber warfare can be used to collect intelligence on an enemy. Anyone seeking to gather intelligence on another individual or group can launch a cyber attack that gains access to protected files. This could be used to help future militant operations or expose critical information. Lastly, cyber warfare can be used to test systems internally. Acting with no malicious intent, “insiders” can utilizing cyber warfare tactics to attack their own cyber security barriers in order to test the strength of their systems. Seeking to expose the vulnerabilities in a system that contains important assets without actually harming the assets provides the system a diagnosis of what needs to be strengths and fixed. Identifying the problem or threats before an actual attack can ultimately save the protected

Espionage threats can bring many consequences, particularly for governments. Governments as well as some private organizations store large amounts of sensitive information within their computer systems. If the information is accessed by unauthorized users that are seeking to cause harm, then it could affect the ability of the government or organization to defend themselves or prevent the threat from happening (Ammori & Poellet,

Private organizations in the United States come under attack weekly if not daily and their cyber defenses must be kept up to par otherwise there will be an extreme loss of information and resources. FBI director James Comey can be quoted as saying “There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who 've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don 't know they 've been hacked by the Chinese” (Comey). Comey can also be quoted as having said that, “China was seeking to obtain "information that 's useful to them so they don 't have to invent" (Comey). This stolen information can be used against these companies when brokering a trade deal or even Chinese companies could begin manufacturing American goods illegally

There is a serious threat to America's current and continued security. This threat comes from reliance on the Internet. With the openness of the Internet and the potential for anonymity, the Internet becomes an easy avenue for enemies to stage a covert attack. “Some governments, like China, have made cyber-warfare a critical part of their military doctrine, in part to help counter the advantage the U.S. has in conventional and nuclear war fighting capability. The United States is highly vulnerable to a timed, well-organized attack from another state or no state

In the U.S. alone, government and private targets are pummeled by hundreds of thousands of hacking attempts every hour. Most of the hacks are directed or sponsored by nation states; the two worst culprits are China and Russia. Luckily, so far they have only figured out how to use the internet to proselytize. If hackers can further their attacks they could wreak absolute havoc economically, politically, and physically. The government has recruited more than 6,000 hackers to the U.S. Cyber Command, a military unit responsible for both combating and waging hack attacks. These hackers that work for the government are always trying to get one step ahead of other hackers, but it is hard to tell what they could do next. This could also increase the

With the focus on terror-based groups and the Middle East over the last fifteen years, many in the United States (US) are unfamiliar with the threat more conventional nation-states pose to the country’s national security. China, Iran, and Russia are seen as the three biggest threats to U.S. national security. Although Russia does not dominate the intelligence disciplines of HUMINT, OSINT, and cyber, its strengths in SIGINT, IMINT, and MASINT make it the biggest threat to the US.

American management has the same problem as Nortel's management as described in the video; American management doesn’t see any threats yet because there is no real evidence of what is being stolen so nobody knows what is being copied and used in china and no one can prove where its coming from, what is being taken, and how its being used. The ignorance of American management in the category of cyber espionage and what is really going on behind the scenes of their networks is what is causing a lot of cyber espionage to continue to happen and continue to drive American businesses to

Corporate espionage attacks are not necessarily committed by adversarial and friendly foreign powers. They may also be committed by competing industrial players whose goal is to steal technology for an upper intellectual advantage, and in doing so, undermine the victim-nation's economy. And while businesses with sensitive defense and government information capabilities are the primary targets of foreign targeting, private organizations have also grown increasingly vulnerable due to the vast expansion of globalization and the interconnected growth of industrialized nations. In either scenario, foreign government or competing industry, spies achieve their means through similar exploitation of weaknesses in technology and insider information.

The past 15 years the U.S. has been in a C.O.I.N. fight that has brought its own unique challenges and with our attention gathered wholly for this undertaking a new threat immerged virtually unnoticed. Cyber threats have been gaining more traction in the media as of late with several countries linked to these type of attacks, with China leading the forefront.

However, there is a significant portion of culprits aiming for secretive intellectual properties, much more than their Eastern European counterparts, whose goal is profit from toxic malwares (Kshetri 2013). Interestingly, Chinese intrinsic hackers hack for some noble causes such as patriotism, political and communal obligations (Kshetri 2013). Typical Chinese perpetrators are overwhelmingly males working individually. They are young amateurs, mostly 17 to 45 years old, with some still in junior high-school. They use toolkits, botnets predisposed online for petty crimes. Contrast to common belief, most don’t receive good education, usually high-school students, unemployed individuals, low-rank employees or manual workers. Group based cyber crimes, on the other hand, are more complicated. These groups are highly specialized, diversely scattered and horizontally organized. They are tailored to specific task-for-hire such as creating botnets or releasing Trojan malwares. Their members are located across China and work as equal with little to none hierarchical order. The interconnectedness and space-time boundlessness of cyber-world help them expand greatly, even passing through sovereign borders with one incident when Chinese hackers attacked the US conglomerate DuPont somewhere between 2009 and 2010. Due to the wild success of online frauds, many traditional criminal organizations have switched to Internet based operations. Some online groups go further and get backed up by legitimate corporates seeking extra profit under the table (Chan & Wang

Cyber-attacks are one of the most significant threats the U.S. faces today. The vulnerabilities that come with the world’s dependence on technology are a tremendous hazard to the United States. This threat is substantial enough for President Trump to designate USCYBER Command as a combatant command.19 This essay addresses how the use of cyber-attacks, as a military force, can destroy strategic targets and how Hart and Sun Tzu would view cyber-attacks. A state sponsored cyber-attack designed and executed with the intent of causing willful destruction to another nation is an act of war.

Cyberwarfare - The strengthening of our advantage in the cyber domain directly influences the operational environment by preventing the degradation of the technological advantage we currently enjoy. Despite known and predicted risk, we currently have a 10:1 advantage over our nearest peer competitor China, as regards technology, research, and development. (Miller, p.11) A failure to protect and defend our cyber domain could have catastrophic effects on our infrastructure, economy, military capabilities, and even threaten the public’s confidence in our democratic process (CCJO JF 2030, p. A-1). Non-state actors use of cyber warfare presents a unique challenge to nation states in that it has the potential to degrade traditional forms of national power such as diplomacy, information, military and economic power (Miller, p.34).