2011 report to congress - U.S.-China Economic and Security Review ...

173network exploitations to facilitate industrial espionage and thecompromise of U.S. and foreign government computer systems. Evidencealso surfaced that suggests Chinese state-level involvementin targeted cyber attacks. Expert testimony to the Commission explainedand contextualized China’s strategy for the use of such attacksto achieve military objectives. In parallel to these developments,China asserted a greater level of control on domestic Internetcontent and engaged in various online surveillance activities.‡Malicious Cyber Activities onU.S. Department of Defense NetworksAs the Commission reported in 2010, the U.S. government as awhole does not publish comprehensive statistics about maliciouscyber activities on its networks. The Commission uses statisticspublished by the Department of Defense about exploitations andattacks on the department’s information systems as one indicatorof overall trends in the cybersecurity environment. Figure2, below, demonstrates changes in the volume of such activitiesover the past decade. Not all of the incidents depicted below specificallyrelate to China (the department has not made availablethat level of detail).dkrause on DSKHT7XVN1PROD with $$_JOB‡ This subsection’s findings follow from numerous studies and reports over the past year thatimplicate China. Many times, investigators attribute incidents on the basis of technical or operationalinformation, the details of which rarely become public. Other times, conclusions rely oninference. In either case, professional investigators typically offer attribution assessments witha specified degree of confidence. Such qualifications sometimes are inadequately conveyed, especiallyin secondary reports. Moreover, third parties likely use a variety of measures to maketheir attacks appear as coming from China in order to conceal their identities. (This model isa reasonable explanation for some penetrations, such as those for intellectual property theft, butless so for others, such as those that target Chinese dissidents.) Still, in the aggregate, the developmentsdescribed below present compelling evidence of Chinese intrusions in practice.VerDate Nov 24 2008 13:46 Nov 10, 2011 Jkt 067464 PO 00000 Frm 00185 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 G:\GSDD\USCC\2011\067464.XXX 067464