On Dec. 13th, 2011, Michael Riley and John Walcott wrote a fantastic article for Bloomberg Businessweek on the depths of Chinese cyber espionage against the US. The article highlighted the lengths that the Chinese will go to in order to extract US information. Specifically, the article mentioned how Chinese hackers went after a provider of internet services for the Marriott hotel chain; by hacking into this company, the Chinese were able to access millions of confidential e-mails from business executives that concerned product development and merger negotiations. Moreover, the Chinese may have used the hotel software as a backdoor way to access the corporate networks themselves.
The article goes on to say that over the past decade, the Chinese have hacked over 760 companies, universities, ISPs, and government agencies.
This prompted Rep. Mike Rogers to say “They are stealing everything that isn’t bolted down, and it’s getting exponentially worse.”
The article also quoted cyber expert Richard Clarke as saying “What has been happening over the course of the last five years is that China — let’s call it for what it is — has been hacking its way into every corporation it can find listed in Dun & Bradstreet…Every corporation in the U.S., every corporation in Asia, every corporation in Germany. And using a vacuum cleaner to suck data out in terabytes and petabytes. I don’t think you can overstate the damage to this country that has already been done.”
Interestingly, Clarke said that US cyberspies don't go after foreign businesses, but rather, foreign governments, militaries, and terrorists groups. This is so the US can defend itself rather than exploit foreign technology.
The article goes on to chronicle the Chinese operation "Byzantine Foothold", and how pervasive Chinese cyber espionage really is.
The rest of the article can be found here, and is definitely worth a look.
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