China's cyberwar strategy: first-strike

Following up on the post of two weeks ago about Estonia under cyberattack from Russia:  according to a Pentagon report to the US Congress - downloadable here (PDF 6 Mb) -- China has developed first-strike cyberwarfare capabilities. The People's Liberation Army "has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, and tactics and measures to protect friendly computer systems and networks. In 2005, the PLA began to incorporate offensive CNO into its exercises, primarily in first strikes against enemy networks". CNO stands for "Computer network operations". The Foreign Policy blog, from which I got this information, underscores that this signals a shift in the Chinese cyberwar thinking, which was so far focused defensively. Tensions with Taiwan might explain the change -- taking down the Taiwanese electronic infrastructure would be a key target in a possible military campaign. Says the report: "A limited military campaign could include computer network attacks against Taiwan’s political, military, and economic infrastructure to undermine the Taiwan population’s confidence in its leadership".
I'll come back to this in a few days, as I'm reading Guy-Philippe Goldstein's fabulous book "Babel minute zéro" (in French), which deals exactly with this issue.

Comments

[Julia O'Brien]

Indeed, China has been thinking of CNOs for a long time now and is even rumoured to have run a "ground test" of its cyberwar abilities on Taiwan's ATM networks in 1999. The other field of any major cyberattack is space since major military communications would use satellites. And, again, it is telling that China's APL has started the year with a full antisatellite attack test. But to me, the most important point you made in your article is in its title: "first-strike" is critical to understand the new nature of cyberwar. In the ancient art of war, there was a natural advantage to defensive posture vs. offensive posture in terms of ressources required. The mechanized war of the XXth has started to shift the balance. The cyberwar of the XXI may totally obliterate this old-time balance. But this in effect will have profound and possibly desastrous effect on diplomatical equilibrium - since it will put new emphases on preventive war doctrines.

[Spy Guy]

For about a year now the former Chief Strategist of Netscape has been warning everyone through his articles that this was a huge threat and actually identified several strategies and tactics that if used would compromise the information infrastructure in the U.S. and globally. Why is it our intelligence services are just waking up to this threat? Why is it throughout history we ignore or dismiss the experts until it is too late! I just did a Google search (Kevin Coleman Cyber Attack) and found over 13,000 references. With that much intelligence we should be much further along in protecting and defending against cyber attacks that we are today!