The impressive rise of China as a major economic and political power has started to garner attention – number one country in numbers of new car sales, fastest growing major economy among developed countries, threatening both Germany and Japan as largest exporting county, etc. But one title that China has recently taken – second in the World as source of hack attacks is a dubious achievement but of rising concern as noted here.
The Wall Street Journal and NYTimes have been following and reporting on these Chinese Hack Attacks the longest and with increasing frequency. The problem is that the Chinese, having vehemently denied the recent January attacks on Google and other US sites, are now being conclusively implicated as the source of the attacks. The evidence of hack attacks from China have been slowly building up – see here and here. But perhaps the best report on the overall cyber security situation comes from the Wall Street Journal which shows the US is number one in Spam and Hack attacks while China has moved into second place.
US Still No.1 as source of Hack Attacks
The problem for the Chinese is that they have a decades old history of being on the frontlines of cyber atacks and warfare as seen in this 2005 report from Time and 2001 story from the BBC. So yes, the US is still the leading source of hack and spam attacks and China is a growing No.2, but the real problem is whether the World can afford games of escalating Cyber attack and more menancingly, pervasive international criminal sponsorship as well as shadowy government influence.