Source: Oliver Scanlan, openDemocracy
On Thursday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported to Congress that there had been a steep rise in attempts to infiltrate and disrupt US government websites. Although the commission noted that these attacks come from all over the world, it went on to highlight the People’s Republic of China as the largest single source. Colonel Gary McAlum told the commission that, at 54,640, the number of ‘malicious incidents’ related to US government websites in 2008 represents an increase of twenty percent compared with the previous year.
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In addition, Information Warfare (IW), along with innovations such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and mass casualty terrorism, is a permutation of asymmetric warfare; it is an attempt to challenge the vastly superior conventional forces of the United States by focusing on its vulnerabilities. As such, Chinese hackers might be compared to the privateers covertly endorsed by Tudor England to disrupt the much larger Spanish empire.