On May 30, 2007 in a blog post titled “Cyberwar” I wrote about a distributed denial-of-service attack launched against Estonia. According to an article published on February 19, 2010 in the New York Times, investigators into the online attacks on Google and reportedly more than 30 other companies including Intel, Adobe and Yahoo, which involved in part the unauthorized access to dozens of accounts of Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China, have traced the attacks to two Chinese schools; Shanghai Jiaotong University, which has one of China’s top computer science programs and whose students recently won an international computer programming competition beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities, and the Lanxiang Vocational School, that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. A professor at Jiaotong was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.”
Writing in the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows suggests China may not be our biggest cyberwar threat. Quoting a former diplomat who worked on security and intelligence issues, that former official stated that our #1 electronic threat was Russia, #2 was the Israelis, who are looking for political advantage, tied with the Israelis is China, but the French, who are looking for economic advantage, and the Brazilians, who are involved in financial crime, are also countries to be concerned about. On May 30, 2007 in a blog post titled “Cyberwar” I wrote about a distributed denial-of-service attack launched against Estonia. According to an article published on February 19, 2010 in the New York Times, investigators into the online attacks on Google and reportedly more than 30 other companies including Intel, Adobe and Yahoo, which involved in part the unauthorized access to dozens of accounts of Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China, have traced the attacks to two Chinese schools; Shanghai Jiaotong University, which has one of China’s top computer science programs and whose students recently won an international computer programming competition beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities, and the Lanxiang Vocational School, that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. A professor at Jiaotong was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.”
Writing in the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows suggests China may not be our biggest cyberwar threat. Quoting a former diplomat who worked on security and intelligence issues, that former official stated that our #1 electronic threat was Russia, #2 was the Israelis, who are looking for political advantage, tied with the Israelis is China, but the French, who are looking for economic advantage, and the Brazilians, who are involved in financial crime, are also countries to be concerned about.
