U.S. and Chinese officials concluded two days of meetings Wednesday to curb cybercrime as China’s state-run news agency said a hacking attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management was carried out by criminals there.
Last month the U.S. Office of Personnel Management was hit by a drastic cyberattack which resulted in personal information of millions of current and former U.S. government employees to be stolen. While the Obama administration has refrained from pointing fingers it’s believed that the attack originated from China, a new report claims that the administration is mulling a possible retaliation against the People’s Republic.
US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has accused China of "trying to hack into everything that doesn't move in America" and stealing government information, in strongly worded comments likely to irk Beijing.
Clinton, a former secretary of state, pulled no punches in remarks to Democratic supporters at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Saturday.
President Barack Obama said the U.S. is confronting national security threats from violent extremism to Russian aggression that will take years to resolve.
The president’s approach is described in his National Security Strategy, a 33-page document to be released on Friday that offers a counterpoint to Republicans who say Obama has been too slow and timid in confronting global challenges.
The US is lobbing fresh sanctions against North Korea as a response to the cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment even as President Barack Obama's administration refuses to provide evidence of Pyongyang's involvement.
China may have the ability to remotely shut down computer systems of US power utilities, aviation networks and financial companies, according to director of the US National Security Agency Mike Rogers.
Testifying to the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on cyber threats, Rogers said digital attackers have been able to penetrate such systems and perform "reconnaissance" missions to determine how the networks are put together.
Chinese hackers have attacked the US weather satellite network, causing services to be sealed off for a period.
The US regularly accuses China of state sponsored assaults on its businesses, industries and utilities.
The US is currently talking of a cooling in trade hostilities that would ensure the smooth passage of technology sales, but the cyber attack allegations still keep coming. The Washington Post reported that the weather satellite attacks happened in September, but were not revealed until late October.
Cyber security is an irritant to bilateral ties. On Wednesday the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said hackers it believed were backed by the Chinese government had launched more attacks on U.S. companies, a charge China rejected as unfounded.
In May, the United States charged five Chinese military officers with hacking American firms, prompting China to shut down a bilateral working group on cyber security.
Job interviews missed, work and wedding plans disrupted, children unable to fly home with their adoptive parents -- the consequences keep proliferating in the aftermath of a database outage that crippled the US State Department's process for issuing passports, visas, and other documents related to travel to the US.
A new Senate proposal to curb the government's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records and increase transparency about the program has White House backing, and may get more traction with critics who have dismissed other bills as too weak.
Democrat senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the legislation in the United States upper house yesterday.
