Our Chinese Overlords, Or how China is pwning the US

Recently there have been a spate of malware infections and outright attacks on the US infrastructure that have been attributed to the Chinese. According to the site “Darkisitor” much of this attribution is actually the case. I would also hasten to add that I am pretty damn sure that this is the truth of the matter too. The Chinese stated back in the 90’s that they were going to develop cyberspace capabilities and that they would dominate… And here we are today.

Today, the US is in grave danger of having our collective asses handed to us on a platter by the Chinese, as well as the Eastern Europeans (i.e. Russia and all her former satelite countries) as well where cyber attacks are concerned. The attacks differ in types and subtleties, but, by sheer volume and noise, it’s the Chinese who win out. In short, they are the most prolific but not the most sneaky or effective as a whole.

China as a state entitiy has applied the most persistent and large scale attacks against the US not only in a “cyberwar” fashion but also using standard “Espionage” tactics to gain access to assets both of the human as well as computer nature. Spying has become the locus of the Chinese attacks because ultimately, they have realised that the real power to use against the US is not raw firepower, but instead the soft power of economics.

China has long been looking to re-create the old days of what was once Japan’s economic power. A strength to dominate the world with wealth and economic juice that tanslates also into the capabilities to wage “soft war” on all who seek to oppose them. With the advent of the computer and then the internet (the network revolution en toto) they realized that it was possible to usurp the powerful (US) with the very technology that we had created and in fact had been lax at securing. For that matter, even as I write this, we still have a poor grasp on the security needs of our collective computer systems as a nation.

So, back in the 90’s China set out to hone it’s skills in cyber war, all the while it also applied it’s “Thousand Grains Of Sand” approach to it as well as their industrial espionage capabilities. The “Thousand Grains Of Sand” approach is simply this; blanket the adversary with attacks and wait. Some will fail, but some will succeed. Those small successes will, taken as a whole, give a picture of what is going on. So, one asset gets a small piece of the puzzle while another asset may fill in the gap and show you the whole picture. In short, they are patient while being frenetic in the amount of concurrent attacks… Signal to noise.

Fast forward to today and the mess we are in globally economically. Can you imagine the needs that China is feeling post losing 70K plants closing? Their economy is drying up too as ours falters and we buy less and less of their melamine laden crap. So, I am sure that we will see more attrition in the economic and espionage war between our country and theirs. It’s time that the US pay the attention needed to this, and not just the military.

For more check out The DarkVisitor it’s a wealth of fun facts.