By Alexander Bowe
Without Chinese revelations about Chinese hacking and espionage, a cyber-détente is unlikely.
Two issues have dominated the discussion of American-Chinese relations in recent months: the escalating war of words in the South China Sea and cybersecurity. Recently, clandestine hacking conflicts between the United States and China have increased in prominence. A bombshell report by internet security firm Mandiant in February 2013 claimed that a secretive Chinese military unit based out of Shanghai was responsible for a series of hacks on United States-based corporations. Another report a couple of months later showed that China was by far the largest source of international hacking attacks, with 41 percent of the world total (of course, the United States was number two on that list, but more on that in a bit); furthermore, the number of attacks originating in China was found to have drastically increased since the first quarter of that year.
In the last few decades, it has been thought that China intentionally restricted its covert intelligence-gathering operations out of a desire to prevent diplomatic scandals from harming its burgeoning economic relationships; more recently, however, this consensus within the leadership appears to have dissolved, either as a result of a change in the balance of power among internal factions in the CCP leadership or because the leadership simply believes now that China is powerful enough to weather the diplomatic fallout from any such scandals. In any case, as evidenced by the devastating and brazen hack into Washington’s Office of Personnel Management this past June, if Beijing really is the culprit as is suspected, it clearly no longer cares about diplomatic fallout from flexing its cyber-muscles. Either way, actors within China have ramped up their cyber-attacks, both with new tactics like the so-called Great Cannon, an offensive cyberweapon that repurposes the traffic coming into Chinese companies’ servers for the use of DDoS attacks against foreign servers, and with good, old-fashioned hacking for the purpose of stealing information, as in the OPM incident.
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