China confirms existence of online warfare team

by Paul Mah:

The Chinese government has confirmed the existence of an online warfare team that it says is trained to protect the People's Liberation Army from external cyber assaults. The unit is known as the "Blue Army" and consists of 30 Internet specialists drawn from various channels such as existing PLA soldiers, officers, college students and assorted "members of society," according to a report published on The Australian.

A former PLA general cast some light on the caliber of these specialists when he told The Times, "It is just like ping-pong. We have more people playing it, so we are very good at it." Underscoring China's commitment to defending itself against cyber warfare, an official PLA newspaper has stated that "tens of millions" of dollars have been invested in the country's military training network.

When asked whether the unit was set up with the express purpose of mounting online attacks on foreign countries, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng talked about how Internet security is an international issue and how China is also a victim. He told the Global Times: "China is relatively weak in cybersecurity and has often been targeted.

This temporary program is aimed at improving our defenses against such attacks." He added: "The Blue Army's main target is self-defense. We won't initiate an attack on anyone

US may see Cyberattacks as acts of war.

By : Caron Carlson

There's no doubt we live in an age of security anxiety, and this may or may not make you feel better: The Pentagon soon will be prepared to bomb countries harboring cyber crooks who mess with U.S. information networks.

"If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," an unnamed military official told Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes at The Wall Street Journal.

The possibility of using force in retaliation for a cyber attack is outlined in the Department of Defense's first formal cyber strategy, portions of which are slated for publication next month, the newspaper reported. The strategy does not address how the military will determine when a cyber attack is sufficiently destructive to be considered an act of war. Pentagon officials are reportedly considering the idea of "equivalence" when making this determination. If an attack on a computer network causes the level of destruction that a conventional armed attack would cause, then it could call for a military response.

"A cyber attack is governed by basically the same rules as any other kind of attack if the effects of it are essentially the same," said Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force Major General and professor at Duke University School of Law. To use force in retaliation, the United States would have to show that the weapon used by cyber attackers had the same level of impact as that of a traditional attack.

Military officials are aware of the difficulty in determining with certainty the origin of an attack. It can be particularly hard to know whether an attack is linked to a foreign government.

Meanwhile, North Korea is reportedly sending its hackers abroad to hone their skills. A defector was recently quoted saying that the cyberwarfare unit of the country's Reconnaissance General Bureau has expanded from 500 to 3,000 employees, reports John E. Dunn at TechWorld.

Separately, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) sounded the alarm mid-week about a massive cyber attack originating from China that saw hundreds of personal Gmail accounts compromised--including some belonging to unnamed senior U.S. government officials. Some may be tempted to think the sky is falling after reading such a rapid-fire barrage of sobering news.