US Navy chief warns of Chinese cyber attacks

In a week when Google pulled its .cn search operations, registrar GoDaddy stated its intent to leave the region and Dell was also rumoured to be considering leaving China, a senior US military chief has issued another stark warning about the Chinese cyber threat.

Speaking at a US House Armed Services Committee, US Navy admiral Robert Willard explained that US Pacific Command is facing "increasingly active and sophisticated threats to our information and computer infrastructure".

"These threats challenge our ability to operate freely in the cyber commons, which in turn challenges our ability to conduct operations during peacetime and in times of crisis," he continued.

"U.S. Pacific Command, in conjunction with the newly established U.S. Cyber Command and other Service and Agencies, is working on solutions to detecting these attacks on our networks and to responding to them in near real-time."

Willard ran through his country's military relationship with all major Pacific nations including Australia, Japan and Korea, but his greatest warnings were reserved for the People's Republic of China (PRC).

"US military and government networks and computer systems continue to be the target of intrusions that appear to have originated from within the PRC," he said.

"Although most intrusions focus on exfiltrating data, the skills being demonstrated would also apply to network attacks."

The news follows new research from Symantec Hosted Services this week which found China to be the number one source of targeted email attacks of the sort which Google said it suffered at the beginning of the year.

27 Mar 2010