Chinese Cyber Warfare Capabilities a Force to be Reckoned With

Yesterday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a congressional advisory panel, released a joint analysis with Northrop Grumman reporting that the Chinese government is building up their hacking and cyber warfare abilities. The report is based on case studies of prior cyber attacks, People's Liberation Army releases, scholarly contributions from experts, and journals from the Chinese National Defense University and the Academy of Military Sciences.

According to the report, China is a decade into a massive military modernization campaign to drastically increase its ability to engage in cyber warfare, also known as its ability to hack. The goal of this campaign is to have a fully integrated infrastructure with the ability to coordinate military operations on land, in air, at sea, in space, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. The basic premise of a system like this would be to cripple an enemy's communications ability, rendering their military command powerless, while protecting one's own communication systems. Another objective of such a system would be to gather intelligence from the enemy's military communications. The suggestion is that China has already begun to target government and military networks to explore possible weaknesses in the event that they may need to exploit them.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang the same day dismissed the "rumors" of foreign countries as "fabrications."

The USCC's report is available here.