Fergie's Tech Blog

Chinese Hackers Pose a Growing Threat to U.S. Firms

Jessica Guynn writes in The Los Angeles Times:

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet.

While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the lucrative valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much of a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA.

"This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the national-security firm Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., said Thursday. "Before, the Chinese were going after defense targets to modernize the country's military machine. But these intrusions strike at the heart of American innovation community."

The attacks on Google and several dozen other companies have alarmed government officials and lawmakers who warned that the U.S. may already be losing the battle to protect the nation's besieged cyber infrastructure.

posted by Fergie @ 1/14/2010 09:18:00 PM