Senate Intel Chair Demands 'Aggressive' Response to Chinese, Russian Hacking
The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee is calling for an "aggressive" response to an unprecedented counterintelligence report that names names -- specifically China and Russia -- in its allegations of cyberespionage.
On Thursday, the National Intelligence Director's office released a study stating, "Chinese actors are the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage" and that "Russia's intelligence services" are out "to collect economic information and technology from US targets."
Typically, the U.S. government shies away from attributing hacking incidents to particular countries for fear of fingering the wrong nation or upsetting diplomatic relations. Not this time.
Thursday evening, Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in response to the report, "If we are to avoid overt cyber hostilities between nations, we must work as an international community. Getting more nations to sign onto the Budapest Convention -- authored by the Council of Europe, the United States and other nations -- is a good first step, but more aggressive actions are needed." The 2001 convention is a binding pact governing international cooperation on the prosecution of computer crimes.
Thursday's report states that U.S. firms and computer security experts have documented "an onslaught of computer network intrusions originating from [Internet access] addresses in China." The intelligence officials note, however, that proving responsibility remains difficult. "Some of these reports have alleged a Chinese corporate or government sponsor of the activity, but the [intelligence community] has not been able to attribute many of these private sector data breaches to a state sponsor," the study says.
According to officials, Russia is gaming the Internet to diversify its economy, now largely dependent on natural resources, like oil and gas exports. "Moscow's highly capable intelligence services are using [human intelligence], cyber and other operations to collect economic information and technology to support Russia's economic development and security," the report states.
The Russian spies that U.S. authorities apprehended in June 2010 were on assignment to collect technology information, officials add. The FBI released 10 videos of some of their techno-espionage activities this week. In one such video, Anna Chapman meets an undercover agent in a New York coffee shop in June 2010: