The world — maybe even China itself — knows little of its hacker foe/Google attacks teach us only that we know nothing/The Chinese hacker is the perfect 21st-century bogeyman — even the Chinese Government may not be able to grasp the monster’s tentaclesAs bogeymen go, the Chinese hacker is as close to perfection as the early 21st century gets: an agent of asymmetric warfare, deadly with weapons that only a fraction of society can grasp and possibly sanctioned by the East’s great emerging superpower.
If the most recent cyber attacks on Google show anything, it is that the world has so far seen only a rough sketch of what it is up against. Intelligence agencies and “good” hackers from the public and private sectors may know their enemy rather better than most butn indefinable number of shades.
A great many of those shades, claim former intelligence operatives from Europe and the US, do indeed represent the efforts of China to weaponise cyberspace — both as a means of information-gathering and of mounting strikes on the commercial and military interests of rival powers.
But even the Chinese Government may not know about all of its monster’s tentacles or exercise total control. Defining the source of attacks in cyberspace — particularly where there are allegations of government sanction — is notoriously complicated.
In China, many of the most skilled dark artists are fervent nationalists who may be fighting their cyberwars unbidden.
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Some intelligence experts believe that this dynamic has allowed an exaggeration of hacker activity directly ordered by the Chinese Government. An adviser to Citicorp said that the Google attacks were most likely the self-motivated actions of nationalist students gone rogue. Few agree with him. Most believe that it is recklessly naive to believe that the hand of Beijing was not present in this instance.
The alleged ringleader of one of China’s best-known hacker “unions” — a 12,000-strong collective known as the Honker Union famous for a mass attack on US websites in 2001 — said in an interview with a Hong Kong newspaper that the group had never worked for the Government or been asked to infiltrate another country’s computers.
Cyberwar experts believe, however, that Honkers and other groups do have practical links with the Chinese Government as a recruiting ground for Beijing’s official efforts to gain deeper control over cyberspace and as a place where hackers can be found and “contracted” for attacks.