Annual Report of Pentagon on China Unveiled China’s Role in Cyber Attacks

The annual report of Pentagon on China unveiled that the government and military of China targeted the computers of the US government in order to cyber spy the US computers. Intrusion into US computers was directed towards collection of intelligence on the US diplomatic, defence and economic sectors. This in turn would have helped China in its defence programme.

It is important to note that this is the first time that the annual report of the Pentagon directly linked the cyber spying attacks like these to the Government of Beijing. In the past, China has always denied any kind of hacking and has instead blamed others for the attacks like these.

The Pentagon report in the meanwhile also criticised the military modernisation programme of China as well as defence spending on the basis of lack of transparency.

The report highlighted that in the year 2012, various computers across the world, including the ones owned by the US government, were a target of the intrusion and some of these were directly related to the Chinese military and the government.

The attacks basically focused on exfiltrating information which could in turn provide benefit to the defence industry of China. This added concerns primarily because the skills which were required for intrusions like these, were most likely the similar ones required for conducting the computer network attacks.

In March 2013, China announced that the annual defence budget of the country was 114 bn US dollar, an increase of 10.4 percent. Pentagon however estimated that total military expenditure of China in 2012 was much more, somewhere between 135 bn US dollar and 215 bn US dollar.

China, at present, is in disputed state with a lot of its neighbours and these also include East China Sea and South China Sea.