As 2015 comes to an end, some three months after the September summit in which the US and China agreed not to “knowingly” conduct cyber-related operations to steal intellectual property – including trade secrets – mixed signals cloud any judgment as to whether the agreement has in fact changed Chinese cyber policies and actions. Experts cannot even agree on the extent of continuing Chinese economic espionage. Here’s a rundown of the most significant (and sometimes conflicting) facts and theories that have emerged since the summit.
Signs that China is curbing hacking…
First, in a series of reports, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post has chronicled important changes in Chinese cyber practices and organization. Nakashima, though certainly not carrying water for the Obama White House, clearly has access to important sources of information (“senior officials”) within the administration. Her reports have quoted government and private experts who believe that the 2014 US indictment of five PLA officers had a major impact on Beijing. Notable in advancing this theory is James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Washington think tank CSIS, who has stated: “The indictments had an amazing effect in China…The Chinese hated them.”
Nakashima also reported that, after the indictments and since the summit, the PRC has scaled back commercial hacking of US companies. Further, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has taken the lead in cyber and other economic and political espionage from the PLA. The MSS, like the PLA, employs outside contracting hackers, but its hired hands are considered more skillful than those employed by the PLA – and more adept at hiding “telltale digital trails.” With direct ties to many state-owned-enterprises, it is considered particularly well-equipped to sponsor economic sabotage operations.
In an additional sign of Chinese accommodation, the Washington Post further reported that, as a result of talks with US officials, Chinese officials quietly arrested a small group of hackers a week before the summit that were identified by the US as economic espionage culprits. Significantly, however, the Chinese government has not followed through with public prosecutions, which for US officials is the real test. “We need to know that you’re serious,” a US security official reportedly told his Chinese counterparts.
… And signs that it is not
Contrary to this rather benign picture of Chinese activities since the summit, other expert observers claim that there is clear evidence of continued economic spying. In mid-October, the security services firm CrowdStrike reported that it was continuing to track a number of attacks against seven US tech and pharmaceutical firms. Though conceding that it might take time for Beijing to rein in private hacking contractors, CrowdStrike officials noted that the culprit in this case, a group long identified as Deep Panda, had close ties with the government and should have been easy to curb. A second cybersecurity firm, FireEye, also reported continuing activity by previously state-sponsored groups, but warned that it was premature to draw conclusions. More interesting – and more recently – a top counterintelligence official in the office of the Director of National Intelligence broke with other administration officials in expressing skepticism that China would live up to the summit agreement. He stated that he had seen “no indication…that anything has changed.”
The quandary and uncertainty has been summed up by Catherine Lotrionte, who serves as Director of the Institute for Law, Science and Global Security at Georgetown University. She queried: “How many months are you going to wait to see proof that they scaled down? I don’t know what ‘scaled down’ means. Instead of 90 intrusions, is it 30?” She noted that if Beijing really wanted to stop incursions, then they would have ended. But, she concluded: “That’s not what I’m hearing from anyone in the private sector.”
Despite disagreement over Chinese compliance, the Obama administration has pushed ahead with further talks with Chinese officials and, more broadly, with other nations. With the administration’s leadership, the G-20 nations have adopted guidelines for cyber economic sabotage. And in early December, US and Chinese officials held the first US-China High-Level Joint Dialogue on Cybercrime and Related Issues. Officials on both sides were tight-lipped about internal discussions regarding continuing allegations of economic espionage. The dialogue did produce further guidelines for combatting cybercrime and a hotline on cybercrime between the two countries.
The real news developed just as the talks began. In what must be the boldest and most brazen attempt to rewrite history in recent memory, the Chinese news agency Xinhua blandly asserted that the attack on the US Office of Personnel Management computer systems was the result of “criminal activity” and not a state-sponsored cyberattack.
As I have argued before, the Obama administration should be ready to act soon – perhaps by the end of the year – if China continues its economic espionage practices. So far, however, the reaction of US cabinet and staff officials has gone unrecorded.
So here at the end of the year, the jury is still out on the durability of the summit pact. But we do now know for certain that Beijing has a keen sense of humor.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1I40f6A
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment