China's Cyber War -The New Global Battlefield

According to a Pentagon report that the British “Times” has acquired, the United States military believe that China is actively planning cyber attacks against American military installations. One of the plans is apparently an attack on America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet, and was drawn up by two PLA (People’s Liberation Army) air force officials, Sun Yiming and Yang Liping.

The cyber attacks are part of what China believes will be the frontline of any attack against countries such as America, Britain and North Korea. Pentagon assessments believe that China’s race towards reaching “electronic dominance” over their rivals by 2050 is part of their view that such a dominance is “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stages of a war.

Over the past several years, it has become apparent that China has breached American military installations electronically countless times, so much so that President Bush has said that “a lot of our systems are vulnerable to attack”.

During 2005, the Pentagon logged some 79,000 intrusions, noting that 1,300 were labeled as successful. Included in these “successful” attacks were breaches in to the Army’s 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the 4th Infantry Division. Chinese hackers have also forced the relegation of hundreds of computers to inactive service through successful hacks across the Pentagons 100,000 strong network of computers, including a disruption of the US Naval War College’s network.

One of the more distressing aspects to come out of this news comes not from China’s apparent skill at disrupting American technological assets, but the knowledge of what such an attack could do to a developed nation.

It was only February of this year that we saw Russian hackers essentially bring the country of Estonia to its knees as a result of concentrated hacking. Pro-Russian hackers infiltrated the backbone of Estonia’s electronic systems, due to the controversial removal of a Russian memorial to its WWII victims. The hackers were able to successfully and massively disrupt government websites, a major bank, as well as entire telephone networks.

And while Russia is indeed not without prowess in technological circles, the sheer weight of prowess that China has to wield in such a battle could – without a doubt – do serious and lasting damage to a nation so heavily reliant on computer networks as America, among others.

China’s “wealth” of talent comes from competitions that, according to Jim Melnick, a recently retired Pentagon computer network analyst, allow for Chinese hackers to prove their worth to the Chinese military. In the Times article Melnick described a competition held two years ago in Sichuan province that saw the winner eventually grow in stature so much that he was eventually able to create his own hacking business and saw him hired to penetrate computers at a US aerospace defense contractor.
The winner had taken the cyber nom de guerre – pseudonym – Wicked Rose, and is most likely working China, if not directly, in a way that allows the government a certain amount of plausible deniability.

The future is so often painted as pretty and beautiful, with benefits for all of mankind. But human ingenuity never misses a chance to enhance its ability to inflict damage. World War Three could definitely take on a very different look from what we know, but with no less damaging results.