Governments are likely to become targets of increasingly sophisticated Chinese cyber warfare attacks over the next three to five years as the PLA assembles an advanced cybermilitia.
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released a request for proposals to develop a National Cyber Range, part of a $30 billion, government-wide effort to prepare for online battle.
A team at the University of Washington wants to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralize the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.
China is developing weapons that would disable its enemies' space technology such as satellites in a conflict, the Pentagon said in a report released last week. The report also said "numerous" intrusions into computer networks around the world, including some owned by the U.S. government, in the past year seem to have originated in China.
If there were any doubts that the United States is preparing for war in space and cyberspace, testimony before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee last week would have wiped them away. According to Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, "our adversaries understand our dependence upon space-based capabilities, and we must be ready to detect, track, characterize, attribute, predict and respond to any threat to our space infrastructure."
Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA Wired, Feb. 11, 2008 The US Air Force has launched the Cyber Command, dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that computers are military weapons.
China's integrated air defenses--based on cheap, sometimes stolen digital technology--are now considered potentially more threatening to the U.S. than Russia's. The wholesale use of commercial products has made Chinese networks flexible, easy to upgrade and tough to exploit.
Criminals have been able to hack into computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst said this week.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has concluded a weeklong live-fire exercise that involved testing command and control, long-range maneuvers and electromagnetic warfare exercises.
September seemed to mark a serious escalation in global cyber warfare. Media reports detailed what appeared to be Chinese attacks against Pentagon networks and government computer systems in Germany, France and the United Kingdom -- putting Defense Department officials on the offensive.