A "cyber Cold War" is developing as international Web espionage and cyber-attacks become the biggest threats to Internet security, a new report says.
The computer security firm McAfee said governments and government-allied groups were engaging in increasingly sophisticated cyber spying, with many attacks originating from China.
Some 120 countries could be developing the capacity for such activities.
What started as probes to see what was possible have become well-funded and well-organized operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage, the report said, with perpetrators aiming to cause havoc by disrupting critical national infrastructure systems.
Targets include air traffic control, financial markets, government computer networks and utility providers. In September, the Guardian newspaper reported that Chinese hackers, including some believed to be from the state military, had been attacking the computer networks of British government departments, including the UK Foreign Office. China has spelled out in a white paper that "informationized armed forces" are part of its military strategy.
McAfee, whose report was compiled with input from NATO, the FBI and the UK's Serious Organized Crime Agency, said that according to NATO insiders, the wave of cyber attacks that hit Estonia earlier this year, disrupting government, news and bank servers for weeks, was the tip of the iceberg. In May, the Baltic state said that at least 1 million computers had been used in the cyber warfare, which saw hundreds of thousands of hits bombarding Estonian Web sites to jam them and make them unusable. The method used was known as distributed denial of service.
The attack coincided with the climax of a dispute between Moscow and Tallinn over a Soviet World War II memorial in the Estonian capital, but officials there backed away from accusing the Kremlin directly.
Russian officials have denied any state responsibility.
In the past 12 months there have been reports of cyber attacks against government targets in the US, Germany, India, New Zealand and Australia. China has denied any involvement.
"We have seen attempts by a variety of state and non-state-sponsored organizations to gain unauthorized access to, or otherwise degrade, department of defense information systems," a Pentagon spokesman said.
NATO experts said attackers were using trojan horse software to focus on specific government offices, and 99 percent of cases were probably still undetected.
"The complexity and coordination seen during the Estonia attacks was new," a NATO insider said. "There was a series of attacks with careful timing using different techniques and specific targets. The attackers stopped deliberately rather than being shut down."
James Mulvenon, an expert on China's military, who is also director of the Center for Intelligence and Research in Washington, said the Chinese were the first to jump "feet first" into 21st-century cyber-warfare technology.
Peter Sommer, a computer crime expert and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, who contributed to the report, said: "There are signs that intelligence agencies around the world are constantly probing other governments' networks."
US President Donald Trump yesterday announced sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" on US trading partners, including a 32 percent tax on goods from Taiwan that is set to take effect on Wednesday. At a Rose Garden event, Trump declared a 10 percent baseline tax on imports from all countries, with the White House saying it would take effect on Saturday. Countries with larger trade surpluses with the US would face higher duties beginning on Wednesday, including Taiwan (32 percent), China (34 percent), Japan (24 percent), South Korea (25 percent), Vietnam (46 percent) and Thailand (36 percent). Canada and Mexico, the two largest US trading
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
RSS