China is actively conducting cyber-espionage as a warfare strategy, and has targeted US government and commercial computers, according to a new report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
"China's current cyber-operations capability is so advanced [and] it can engage in forms of cyber-warfare so sophisticated that the US may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts," according to the annual report delivered to US Congress on Thursday.
The report cites news articles and testimony from US officials such as Colonel Gary McAlum, former chief of staff for the US Strategic Command's Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations. The report concludes that Chinese cyberattacks, authoritarian rule and trade violations are impediments to US economic and national-security interests.
A spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, Qin Gang, said the report was misleading, impeding co-operation between the US and China, and "unworthy of rebuttal", according to an article published late on Monday in SC Magazine.
China is targeting government and private computers in the US, including systems operated by the biggest US defence contractors, according to the report, which cited news articles.
China can access an unclassified US military network called the 'NIPRNet' (Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network) and "views it as a significant Achilles' heel and as an important target of its asymmetric capability", according to the report. "[This] gives China the potential capability to delay or disrupt US forces without physically engaging them — and in ways it lacks the capability to do conventionally."
The US government is also at risk as a result of the global computer-supply chain, the commission said. Computer components used by the US and manufactured in China are "vulnerable to tampering by Chinese security services, such as implanting malicious code that could be remotely activated on command and place US systems or the data they contain at risk of destruction or manipulation", the report states. Hundreds of counterfeit routers made in China were found in systems throughout the Department of Defense, the report states.
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The Chinese government is training citizens in cyber-operations at military academies, and tolerates, and even encourages, actions taken by an estimated 250 hacker groups there, the report said.
Chinese military officials believe the US is undertaking cyber-espionage against China, and believe that by striking first with a cyberattack they can plant misinformation and hide their tracks, according to the report.
US officials and lawmakers have complained about specific incidences when Chinese representatives allegedly breached their systems.
This summer, two congressmen who have been long-standing critics of China's human-rights record accused China of compromising computers that had information related to political dissidents. In the spring, government sources told the Associated Press that they were looking into allegations that Chinese officials copied data from a laptop left unattended in China by the commerce secretary.
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