People’s Daily (a mouthpiece of China’s Communist party) released a relatively tame op-ed on cybersecurity today. Noting the U.S. “has recently stepped up the rhetoric against China on cyber espionage,” the op-ed took a defensive tone on American allegations. However, where People’s Daily had previously accused the U.S. of attacking Chinese systems because those attacks came from U.S. IPs, this op-ed said that “[i]n fairness, [the U.S. IP addresses of those attacks] does not mean the hackers were American, or that Washington was supporting or condoning the digital attacks against China.” Nothing else really notable, though this was a nice sentiment: “China-U.S. relations are the most important bilateral relations on earth.”
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On a similar note, President Obama called the newly elected Chinese President Xi Jinping on cybersecurity. Reuter’s Steve Holland explains:
President Barack Obama took mounting U.S. concerns about computer hacking straight to China’s president on Thursday in a sign of how seriously the United States takes the threat of cyber attacks emanating from China . . . the two leaders committed to engage in an ongoing discussion to address the cyber issue, White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters.
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Yesterday President Obama met with a few CEOs to discuss cybersecurity. If you’re interested in which CEOs were present, Foreign Policy’s John Reed has just the article for you. The following CEOs attended:
- Nicholas Akins, President and CEO, American Electric Power Company, Inc.
- Ursula Burns, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Xerox Corporation
- Wes Bush, Northrop Grumman Corporation
- Clarence Cazalot, Chairman, President and CEO, Marathon Oil Corporation
- David Cote, Chairman and CEO, Honeywell International, Inc.
- Scott Davis, Chairman and CEO, United Parcel Service, Inc.
- James Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JP Morgan Chase & Co.
- David Melcher, CEO and President, ITT Exelis
- Brian Moynihan, President and CEO, Bank of America Corporation
- Eric Spiegel, President and CEO, Siemens Corporation
- Randall Stephenson, Chairman and CEO, AT&T Inc.
- Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO, Exxon Mobil
- Maggie Wilderotter, Chairman and CEO, Frontier Communications
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Jennifer Martinez reported for The Hill that “Mark Weatherford, deputy under secretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is leaving the department after a little over a year to serve as a principal at The Chertoff Group.”
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