THE net is getting creaky and old: it is rapidly running out of space and remains fundamentally insecure. And it turns out China is streets ahead of the West in doing anything about it.
A report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society last week details China's advances in creating a next-generation internet that is on a national level and on a larger scale than anything in the West.
China issued a new call on Saturday for international "rules and cooperation" on internet espionage issues, while insisting that allegations of Chinese government involvement in recent hacking attacks were falsified as part of an international smear campaign.
The remarks, by Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, were China's highest level response yet to intensifying accusations that the Chinese military may be engaging in cyber espionage.
Malware researchers at Seculert say they've found two more cases of highly targeted malware coming out of China, and claim to have back-traced it to the same geographical region that was fingered as the source of the Project Aurora attacks.
"It's using a similar MO – infected PDFs sent out as part of a spear-phishing campaign," Aviv Raff, CTO of Seculert, told The Register. "We resolved it and found it was reporting to an IP address in China with the same physical location as the previous attacks. They are up to something."
In a move to counter recent reports claiming that a special unit in the Chinese Army is behind repeated cyber attacks on U.S. institutions, the nation Thursday claimed its military and defense ministries websites are routinely hacked from IP addresses originating within the United States.
Researchers have identified yet more high-profile organisations attacked by spying Chinese hackers after seizing hold of the miscreants' command-and-control servers.
The Chinese government has expressed concerns over recent negative cybersecurity developments and hopes accusations against the country will stop.
Government-backed hackers from China have been blamed once again, this time for an attack on EADS, the maker of the Eurofighter, and German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp.
EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space company, and ThyssenKrupp were targetted by hacking attacks orgininating in China, according to Der Spiegel, which cited unidentified sources within both companies as its sources.
Beijing hotly denies accusations of official involvement in massive cyberattacks against foreign targets, insinuating such activity is the work of rogues. But at least one element cited by Internet experts points to professional cyberspies: China's hackers take the weekend off.
Hackers have embedded viruses into a security report which linked the Chinese army to cyberattacks on U.S. companies, infecting computers that download digital versions of the 60-page report.
When downloaded, the tainted versions would allow hackers to remotely control infected computers after users attempted to read the report which was released last week by U.S. IT security vendor, Mandiant.
The word “China” appears 120 times in the Obama administration’s just-released report, “Administration Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of U.S. Trade Secrets,” on combatting cyber-espionage against U.S. business. Of course, Chinese hacking is a threat to more than just American businesses: the Washington Post reports today that just about every powerful institution in the District, from federal agencies to think tanks to, yes, media organizations “have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies.”
