Chinese Hackers May Have Pinched US Military Designs

Perhaps the Chinese government turned loose its hacker squad to poach sensitive U.S. military documents, giving President Obama a new set of grievances to lodge in his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. However, that simplistic explanation may be just plain wrong. "For almost anything that happens, we point at China as the culprit," noted security expert Ken Silva.

Chinese hackers were accused of stealing the designs for more than two dozen U.S. military weapons systems in a report appearing Monday in The Washington Post.

The system designs pinched by the hackers were for systems critical to the country's missile defenses and its combat aircraft and war ships, the paper said.

The revelations were based on confidential sections of a report prepared by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory group for military brass and Defense Department higher-ups.

China was not linked to the design thefts by the authors of the board's report, the Post acknowledged, but it cited senior military and industry officials with knowledge of the breaches as confirming that a majority of the break-ins were part of a widening Chinese campaign of spying on U.S. defense contractors and government agencies.

 As news of the U.S. weapon systems hacks was emerging, reports surfaced from Australia accusing Chinese hackers of filching the plans for the headquarters of its top spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

 

Aussie Attack 

While news broke of the cyberintrusions in the United States, Australia discovered that it, too, had been targeted by Chinese hackers.

The blueprints for Australia's top intelligence agency reportedly were stolen by Chinese hackers years ago from a contractor working on the US$630 million building, which is in its completion phase.

Until the reported attack this week, some analysts had suggested that Australia was an unlikely target for cyberespionage activities.

"That's ridiculous," Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, told TechNewsWorld.

"Australia's economy is tied very closely to China's," he pointed out, "and there have been oil, gas and mining breaches since 2009."

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