The Chicom cyber war against the West

Telegraph:

Deep beneath the palatial headquarters of the Ministry of State Security in central Beijing, a plot is being hatched – and the target is Britain.

Ranked in front of banks of computer screens in the large, fluorescent-lit offices of the Tenth Bureau, the highly secret department responsible for science and technology, thousands of cyber spies are at work. The hackers, mainly graduates in their twenties, work in eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as part of an unrelenting Blitzkrieg against Britain and other Western countries.

This is warfare without boundaries, and its tactics will dictate the way in which future conflicts are fought.

Chinese cyber spies are under strict orders to target any organisation, from government departments to hedge funds, whose secrets may benefit the communist state, launching as many as 1,000 attacks every day against the UK alone.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence, one of the prime targets, was alone the victim of more than 1,000 cyber attacks last year, and although no official will admit it publicly, the Chinese are the main culprits.

Much is often made of computer geeks such as 19-year-old Ryan Cleary who is accused of being a “major player” in LulzSec, the group that has been linked with attacks on computer networks belonging to the CIA, the police and the US Senate.

But it is the Chinese and the Russians who are the real worry for MI5 and the cyber warfare chiefs at the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

“The Chinese are after every secret the UK possesses,” one senior security official told The Sunday Telegraph. “The main challenge for the Chinese at the moment is not how to steal the secrets but what to do with all the information they now possess. The Chinese have stolen so much information that it is taking them a long time to sift through it to find what is really useful to them. Some of the attacks are highly precise – with others, it’s just trawling – but that provides a measure of their capability.”

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What is needed are effective counter measures that can attack the cyber war probes. Think of how the anti radar missiles work. As soon as they detect a signal our forces can release missiles that will hit the radar and destroy it. We need that kind of response to cyber attacks. The Chicoms want stop until their computers doing the hacks are destroyed.