Chinese Hackers in USA Gov PC's

Chinese Hackers

By GORDON G. CHANG
September 14, 2007

On Wednesday, wire services reported that a senior Chinese official charged foreign intelligence services of causing "massive and shocking" damage to his country through computer espionage.

A vice minister of the Information Industry, Lou Qinjian, did not identify any culprit by name, but he did state that 80% of the computers used in the attacks were based in America. Beijing's accusation came suspiciously only after months of reports of Chinese hacking into Western government information systems.

President Bush had been expected to raise the issue with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, during their 90-minute meeting in Sydney last Thursday. The two leaders had time to discuss a wide range of topics, including China's role in Sudan and Iran. They even found a few moments for a friendly chat about next summer's Olympics.

Mr. Bush, however, was not anxious to talk about the recent Chinese hacker attacks against U.S. government networks. The Pentagon suspects that China's People's Liberation Army successfully penetrated an unclassified computer system serving the office of Defense Secretary Gates this June.

The system was shut down after the perpetrators had obtained information, some of it sensitive. The Pentagon attack followed ones last year in July on the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, in November on the Naval War College, and in December on the National Defense University. In the spring of last year, China accessed State Department computers and installed backdoors in networks to siphon off information on China and North Korea.

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