Cyberattacks that temporarily paralyzed government Web sites and manipulated display screens at convenience stores and a train station coincided with the arrival of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taipei on Tuesday, with Chinese hackers likely to blame.
On Tuesday, the Presidential Office’s Web site was taken offline for about 20 minutes following a distributed denial of service attack, in which multiple computers are focused on a single target in an attempt to take it offline.
The government’s official English-language portal and Web sites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of National Defense and Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport were also targeted, causing short shutdowns from Tuesday to Friday.
On Wednesday, display screens behind the cashiers at some 7-Eleven convenience stores abruptly changed to a message calling Pelosi a “warmonger” and saying “get out of Taiwan.”
A public display screen at a train station showed a message calling Pelosi’s visit “a severe provocation to the motherland” and “the great China will be united” in simplified Chinese characters.
On Thursday, the Kaohsiung Environmental Protection Bureau’s Web site was changed to show China’s national flag.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said that the government’s English portal and the foreign ministry’s Web sites had since Tuesday detected massive attacks from Internet protocol addresses in China, Russia and other places, with up to 17 million requests per minute reported.
Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳) — who on Friday was announced as the first minister of digital affairs — said that the volume of cyberattacks on government Web sites on Tuesday was unprecedented, exceeding 15,000 gigabits in a day, about 23 times more than the previous record.
The APT 27 hacker group, a China-based group that Western governments suspect is behind several attacks on companies and state agencies, on Wednesday released a YouTube video saying that it would conduct “a special cyberoperation against Taiwan,” including “the Taiwan government and all infrastructure” to oppose the provocation by Pelosi’s visit, although the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to comment on the issue.
The cyberactivity, along with Beijing’s unprecedented military drills, are at first glance a furious response to Pelosi’s visit, but they also seem to be a show of its military power to invade or blockade Taiwan, indicating what China’s “hybrid warfare” might look like if it were to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan.
Although the Cabinet said that the operations of government agencies and transportation networks were not affected by the cyberattacks, the incidents should not be overlooked, as obstruction of public-government communication and the spread of disinformation can erode public trust in the government.
The government should conduct a cybersecurity review of its critical agencies and key infrastructure — such as power plants, electric grids, pipelines, telecommunications services and transportation networks — to make sure they are not vulnerable to more sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks.
It should also consider “crowdsourcing” cybersecurity experts by offering rewards for people to test, discover and report security vulnerabilities in government systems.
Moreover, the government should urge the private sector to remain watchful, step up their cyberdefenses and immediately report incidents, as data from the past few years suggest that cyberattacks will continue to increase.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS