Sick Hackers Of Asia

China’s cyberattacks should make it a trade pariah
New York Post


Four members of China’s People’s Liberation Army now stand charged in the 2017 Equifax hack, one of the largest cybercrimes ever — and they were plainly working Beijing’s will, since they’re all members of a PLA unit dedicated to hacking.
In other words: China is waging cyberwar on the West even as it insists on being treated like a normal country.
The hack of one of the biggest US consumer-credit reporting agencies grabbed personal info on half the country: birthdates and Social Security numbers of 145 million and driver’s license info of 10 million, plus 200,000 stolen credit-card numbers.
And the danger goes far beyond the monetary, Attorney General William Barr noted in announcing the charges: “These thefts can feed China’s development of artificial intelligence tools, as well as the creation of intelligence targeting packages” — meaning industrial as well as regular-old espionage.
This follows the feds’ 2014 indictment of PLA hackers for breaching the computer systems of a number of American manufacturers, among other crimes.
Since then, notes Barr, “We have witnessed China’s voracious appetite for the personal data of Americans, including the theft of personnel records from the Office of Personnel Management, the intrusion into Marriott Hotels and Anthem health-insurance companies and now the wholesale theft of credit and other information from Equifax.”
It’s unlikely the hackers will ever face trial — and even less likely Beijing will stop trying to steal American data and know-how.
The Trump administration’s efforts to block the Chinese firm Huawei from building 5G networks in the West is clearly the bare minimum needed now.

As lucrative as China’s market may be, the rest of the world needs to start asking how it can trade with a pack of unapologetic thieves.

Chinese hackers secured a trove of highly sensitive data on submarine warfare

Chinese Hackers Steal Unclassified Data From Navy Contractor

By Helene Cooper

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recently disinvited the Chinese military from a large, multinational naval exercise this summer.

WASHINGTON — China has stolen sensitive data related to naval warfare from the computers of a Navy contractor, American officials said on Friday, in another step in the long-running cyberwar between two global adversaries.
The breach occurred this year, the officials said, when Chinese government hackers infiltrated the computers of a company working on a Navy submarine and underwater programs contract. 

The company, which was not identified, was doing work for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, which is based in Newport, R.I.
Officials said that the data gleaned by China was unclassified.
Navy officials declined to speak publicly about the hack, which was first reported by The Washington Post.
But in a statement, Lt. Marycate Walsh, a Navy spokeswoman, cited “measures in place that require companies to notify the government when a cyberincident has occurred that has actual or potential adverse effects on their networks that contain controlled unclassified information.”
She said it would be “inappropriate to discuss further details at this time.”
China and the United States have been locked in an escalating fight over cyber and military technology, with Beijing making rapid gains in recent years. 

American officials — from both the Trump administration and the Obama administration before it — concede that Washington has struggled to deter Chinese hacking, and have predicted the cyberattacks will increase until the United States finds a way to curb them.
The theft of the Navy system is hardly the largest, or the most sensitive, of the designs and systems stolen by Chinese hackers over the years. 

But it underscores a lesson the American government keeps learning: No matter how fast the government moves to shore up it cyberdefenses, and those of the defense industrial base, the cyberattackers move faster.
The plans for the F-35, the nation’s most expensive fighter jet in history, were taken more than a decade ago, and the Chinese model looks like an almost exact replica of its American inspiration.
A People’s Liberation Army unit, known as Unit 61398, was filled with skilled hackers who purloined corporate trade secrets to benefit Chinese state-owned industry. 

But many of its targets were defense related as well. 

Members of the unit were indicted in the last two years of the Obama administration, but none are likely to come back to the United States to stand trial.
The most sophisticated hack of American data took place at the Office of Personnel Management. 

It lost the files of about 21.5 million Americans who had filed extensive questionnaires for their security clearances. 

The forms listed far more than Social Security numbers and birth dates. 

They detailed medical and financial histories; past relationships; and details about children, parents and friends, particularly non-United States citizens.

The office stored much of the data at the Interior Department and encrypted nearly none of it. 

So when the Chinese copied it in a highly sophisticated operation, they were prepared to use big data techniques to draw a map of the American elite, who worked on which projects and who knew whom. 

The loss was so severe that American intelligence agencies canceled the deployment of new officers to China.

Lieutenant Walsh said that the Navy treated “the broader intrusion against our contractors very seriously.”
“If such an intrusion were to occur, the appropriate parties would be looking at the specific incident, taking measures to protect current info, and mitigating the impacts that might result from any information that might have been compromised,” she said.
The United States and China are wrangling over trade issues but also jointly looking to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. 

Donald Trump is headed to Singapore this weekend for a June 12 summit meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
The United States and China are also tangling over Beijing’s militarization of disputed islands in the South China Sea.
Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis harshly criticized the Chinese government for continuing to militarize a string of islands in the South China Sea, calling the presence of advanced military equipment and missiles there a flagrant show of military power.
To add muscle to American complaints, Mr. Mattis recently disinvited the Chinese military from a large, multinational naval exercise this summer — in part because of the anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles, and other weapons, that China has positioned on the Spratly Islands.
A United States official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to be identified in discussing the issue, said the Navy was investigating the breach with the help of the F.B.I.

Rogue Nation

China’s a trade cheat
By Fareed Zakaria

Employees work inside an LCD factory in Wuhan, China. 

Ever since the resignation of top advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster, it does seem as if the Trump White House has gotten more chaotic, if that is possible. 

But amid the noise and tumult, including the alarming tweets about Amazon and Mexico, let’s be honest — on one big, fundamental point, President Trump is right: China is a trade cheat.
Many of the Trump administration’s economic documents have been laughably sketchy and amateurish. 

But the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s report to Congress on China’s compliance with global trading rules is an exception worth reading. 

In measured prose and great detail, it lays out the many ways that China has failed to enact promised economic reforms and backtracked on others, and uses formal and informal means to block foreign firms from competing in China’s market. 

It points out correctly that in recent years, the Chinese government has increased its intervention in the economy, particularly taking aim at foreign companies. 

All of this directly contradicts Beijing’s commitments when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Whether one accepts the trade representative’s conclusion that “the United States erred in supporting China’s entry into the WTO,” it is clear that the expectation that China would continue to liberalize its markets after its entry has proved to be mistaken.

Washington approached China’s entry into the world trading system no differently from that of other countries that joined in the mid-20th century. 

As countries were admitted, the free world (especially the United States) opened its markets to the new entrants, and those countries in turn lowered barriers to their markets. 

That’s how it went with such nations as Japan, South Korea and Singapore. 

But there were two notable factors about these countries: They were relatively small compared with the size of the global economy, and they also lived under the American security umbrella. 

Both factors meant that Washington and the West had considerable leverage over these new entrants. Singapore had 2.2 million people and a gross domestic product of $19 billion when it joined the GATT (the precursor to the WTO), while South Korea had 30 million people and a GDP of $41 billion. 

Japan was larger, with 90 million people and a GDP of under $800 billion. (All GDP figures are adjusted for inflation.)
And then came China, with 1.3 billion people and a GDP of $2.4 trillion when it joined the WTO in 2001. 

That was almost a fifth of the U.S. economy. 

The Chinese seemed to recognize that once they were in the system, the size of their market would ensure that every country would vie for access, and this would give them the ability to cheat without much fear of reprisal. 

Moreover, Beijing was never dependent on Washington for its security. 

It had fought a war against American troops in the 1950s with some success and had grown into a great power in its own right.
The scale and speed of China’s integration into the world trading system made it a seismic event. 

The distinguished economist David Autor, along with two colleagues, has published study after study on the impact of the so-called China Shock. 

They conclude that about a quarter of all manufacturing jobs lost in the United States between 1990 and 2007 could be explained by the deluge of Chinese imports. 

Nothing on this scale had happened before.
Look at the Chinese economy today. 

It has managed to block or curb the world’s most advanced and successful technology companies, from Google to Facebook to Amazon. 

Foreign banks often have to operate with local partners who add zero value — essentially a tax on foreign companies. 

Foreign manufacturers are forced to share their technology with local partners who then systematically reverse engineer some of the same products and compete against their partners. 

And then there is cybertheft. 

The most extensive cyberwarfare waged by a foreign power against the United States is done not by Russia but by China. 

The targets are American companies, whose secrets and intellectual property are then shared with Chinese competitors.
China is not alone. 

Countries such as India and Brazil are also trade cheats. 

In fact, the last series of world trade talks, the Doha Round, was killed by obstructionism from Brazil and India, in tandem with China. 

Today the greatest threat to the open world economy comes from these large countries that have chosen to maintain mixed economies, refuse to liberalize much more and have enough power to hold firm.
The Trump administration may not have chosen the wisest course forward — focusing on steel, slapping on tariffs, alienating key allies, working outside the WTO — but its frustration is understandable. 

Previous administrations exerted pressure privately, worked within the system and tried to get allies on board, with limited results. 

Getting tough on China is a case where I am willing to give Trump’s unconventional methods a try. Nothing else has worked.

Sina Delenda Est

How China became emboldened and embittered -- and how its leaders' desire for global domination may lead to a conflict with America
By MAX HASTINGS

With the busy lives that everybody leads and one eye on the clock for when Tesco shuts, you might have failed to notice that Beijing has this week been hosting the 19th Congress of the Communist Party.
Some 2,300 unswervingly loyal apparatchiks have gathered to cheer to the rafters Xi Jinping, the most powerful man in the world.
Those last few words may cause some people to demand: but what about Donald Trump?
It is true that the leader of the United States commands a much larger nuclear arsenal, and that his country is still richer and stronger than China. 

But Trump — thank goodness — is a moron.

America remains the world’s largest democracy: its system of checks and balances is (sort of) working.
In China, by contrast, there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights. 

Xi wields almost absolute authority, amid ever more draconian restrictions on dissent and free speech, even within the Party hierarchy. 

‘China needs heroes,’ he has written, ‘such as Mao Tse-tung’.

In China there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights.

He thus celebrates a predecessor whom almost everybody recognises as the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, even ahead of Adolf Hitler.
The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability. 

The only institution that retains any influence is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
While Xi talks to the world (without being much believed) about his desire for China to be a good neighbour, part of the fellowship of nations — his commanders become ever more hawkish.
Hundreds of billions are poured into armies, fleets, missile forces, with the defence budget rising by 10 per cent last year. 

The country has established its first overseas military base, in the port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and now boasts a navy that sails the Red Sea and the Baltic.
Some 60,000 people are employed in military cyber-operations of scary sophistication: four years ago, 140 attacks on U.S. institutions were traced to a single PLA unit in Shanghai. 

The Chinese own a formidable satellite-killer capability, which could inflict critical damage on American communications.
Chinese people seem ready to applaud their armed forces’ new activism: their big movie hit of 2017 has been Wolf Warrior 2, about a Chinese soldier mowing down his country’s enemies abroad, on a more lavish scale than does Britain’s James Bond.
Here is the Heavenly Kingdom, among the oldest and greatest civilisations on earth, seeking to reassert long-lost might and majesty. 

Young Chinese are taught that their ancestors possessed a 'civilised', literate culture five centuries before Julius Caesar invaded Britain. 

The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability.

Today, the Chinese reason: why should we continue to follow the dictates and to swallow the "insults" of the West?
The U.S. Navy still claims dominance of the Pacific, as it has done since 1945. 

Both Washington and Tokyo question China’s right to extend its frontiers in the South and East China Seas.
Above all, the West resists Beijing’s insistence on reclaiming Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists established a bastion under American protection after they lost the Civil War to Mao in 1949.
The Chinese refer to their ‘century of humiliation’ which began with the Opium Wars, during which in 1860 an Anglo-French army pillaged one of their greatest artistic masterpieces, the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing.
This symbolic climax of ‘Western barbarianism’ stands close to the head of a catalogue of historic grievances that feeds China’s modern sense of victimisation, and which it is determined to repair.
The mounting tensions between China and the U.S. and its allies could lead to conflict in the decade or two ahead.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, declares in his new work, The Future Of War, that armed conflict between great powers is almost certain to continue ‘wherever there is a combination of an intensive dispute and available forms of violence... at first it may bear little resemblance to our common views of war, but any continuing violence has the potential to turn into something bigger’.
Freedman means, of course, that a new great power clash is likely to start with an escalating, yet invisible and noiseless, cyber-exchange, which could deliver a pre-emptive strike against the enemy’s high-tech weapons systems, or even more broadly its civil infrastructure, for instance electricity grids and telecoms networks.
In 1991, an American expert on security and cyber-warfare wrote a futuristic novel suggesting the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ surprise assault. 

This has since become technologically more plausible.
Almost no nation — perhaps not even North Korea — is eager to launch a nuclear first strike, justifying annihilatory retaliation. 

But many Americans, in and out of uniform, are apprehensive about the danger of a cyberwar first strike.
Both Chinese and U.S. commanders fear that failure to knock out the other’s high-tech information and weapons-guidance systems early in a confrontation could fatally weaken the loser if hostilities heated up.

Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments. 

Consider the effect if, for instance, a Chinese cyber-thrust disabled the catapults on a U.S. aircraft carrier: a £12 billion platform would suddenly become impotent.
Christopher Coker urges the peril of reprising 1914, when Austria and Germany precipitated a huge conflagration because they started out with illusions that they risked only a small one, with Serbia.
This is a comparison I made myself a few years ago to a delegation of Chinese military men visiting London, who asked if I saw comparisons with 1914, about which I had just published a book. 

I suggested that the huge irony of what happened a century ago was that if Germany had not gone to war, it could have achieved dominance of Europe within a generation through its industrial and technological superiority.
Surely nothing at stake in the South China Sea or with Taiwan, I said to the Chinese, is worth risking all that you have achieved by peaceful means? 

A Chinese officer, obviously unconvinced, responded: ‘But we have claims!’
In my own travels in China, I have often been impressed by how much real popular feeling exists, albeit stoked by propaganda, about the separation of Taiwan.

Xi, his personal power strengthened by this week’s 19th Congress, may start throwing his weight around in ways that could generate a crisis — for instance, setting a time limit for the return of Taiwan to Beijing’s control.

In the South China Sea, there are constant tensions and potential flashpoints between the Chinese building new bases in previously acknowledged international or Japanese waters, and American warships and planes asserting rights of navigation.
There is a real prospect of Japan not merely rearming but seeking nuclear weapons in response to the threat posed by North Korea, which Beijing is unwilling to defuse. 

China is morbidly fearful of regime collapse in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, followed by Korean unification and a U.S.-South Korean army on its Yalu river border.
Christopher Coker argues that China, like Russia, is psychologically crippled by its own firewalls against open debate, and thus finds it extraordinarily difficult to relate to other nations, or to see things from others’ points of view.
Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments.
Beijing sees things through a narrow nationalistic prism which makes it hard for its leadership to guess how an antagonist might act in a confrontation. 

None of the academics I cite above suggests a major war is inevitable. 

Some argue that Chinese ambitions are more economic than globally strategic; that the country’s internal difficulties and resource shortages — especially of water — will constrain its growth and keep Xi too busy at home to gamble disastrously abroad.

Yet the combination of Donald Trump’s isolationism alongside Xi’s unconstrained dictatorship, poses grave dangers to stability and peace.
We should not underrate the risk that a Chinese general or admiral might lash out on his own initiative or overplay his hand by firing on U.S. warships or aircraft.
In the recent past, there have been episodes in which China’s commanders have taken dangerous and provocative actions without reference to Beijing — for instance, launching a new satellite weapon or testing a stealth aircraft with great fanfare while a U.S. defence secretary was in town.
Again and again, escalation has been averted by wise caution on the part of the Americans.
Statesmanship, which requires steady diplomacy and constant horse-trading, is indispensable to keep us safe. 

Yet this is becoming ever harder to come by when China is flexing its muscles.
On one side, we see a rising power impelled by a centuries-old sense of grievance; on the other, the U.S., with a sense of global entitlement no longer compatible with the aspirations and might of others.
In 1910, Brigadier Henry Wilson, commandant of the British Army’s staff college, told his students there was likely to be a big European war. 

One of his audience remonstrated, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could make such a thing happen.
Wilson guffawed derisively: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is what you are going to get.’
So the world did. 

And could again.