China's Internet Threat

In 1946, Albert Einstein made the famous statement: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Well Albert, I can now tell you how World War III will be fought. The weapons will be keyboards and the battleground will be cyberspace. No longer does a nation have to bomb an enemy to destroy that nation's critical economic and military infrastructure. Today, industrialized nations rely on the Internet for every aspect of their economy, government and military operations. A total disruption of the Internet could bring the world economy to a halt and cripple the ability of western nations to effectively deploy their military.

A recent report by the Heritage Foundation entitled, "Trojan Dragons: China's International Cyber Warriors" describes the emphasis that China is placing on cyber warfare. The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has cyber warfare brigades that are already at work probing, hacking and stealing data from US and European computer systems. The Chinese cyber attacks haven't been limited to government systems. In fact, their primary target is economic and industrial information systems. China's intelligence collection is the top intelligence threat to America's science and technology secrets.

"America is under widespread attack in cyberspace", testified General James Cartwright of the US Strategic Command to Congress in March 2007. There were more than 80,000 attempted attacks on military computer networks in 2007. These attacks were often successful in impacting US military operations. Of concern to the government isn't the high school hacker having fun, but the concerted Internet attacks that are coming out of China. In the last three months, attacks against the US government from China have tripled. The Chinese cyber warfare units have already penetrated the US military's unclassified but sensitive IP router network (NIPRNET) and have designed software to disable it in time of conflict.

The Chinese have developed a very sophisticated and advanced capability to attack and degrade US and European computer networks and it is time that western nations recognize the threat. This threat is not only to the military, but to commercial, financial and energy networks. The actions of the Chinese cyber warriors in penetrating and stealing data from foreign nations have crossed the boundary of acceptable international behavior during peace time. It is time for the US and Europe to take strong diplomatic actions to halt and control the cyber warfare actions of the Chinese military.

Michael E. Bennett has over 25 years of experience in federal government telecommunications and information technology systems. He is currently the operations officer for a Department of Defense organization that provides worldwide telecommunications for the US military. Mr. Bennett's expertise covers a wide area of disciplines to include broadband, SONET, ATM, DWDM, fiber optics and satellite communications. Mr. Bennett is a 1981 graduate of the University of Maryland and holds a Masters of Science degree in Telecommunications from the University of Denver.

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