BIRMINGHAM – Last Tuesday Google announced that they had been hacked by sources in China. The target was email accounts of Chinese activists and bloggers. An outraged Google threatened to discontinue censoring search results at the Google China search engine google.cn. Yahoo chimed in support of Google. Yahoo of course is another Internet company with a history of bowing to Chinese requests including providing information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who still has four years of his sentence to serve.

According to the New York Times:

?Several human rights advocates in China said last week that their Gmail accounts had been compromised, among them Ai Weiwei, an artist, and Teng Biao, a lawyer.?

In addition two foreign journalists, one from the Associated Press, claim their gmail accounts were compromised.

Google claims they found evidence of attacks on 33 companies. Some of these have acknowledged the attacks: Yahoo, Symantec, Northrup Grumman, Dow Chemical, a law firm involved in suing China, Adobe, and even India has gone public with accusations that China has been hacking them.

Chinese cyber espionage should come as no surprise. A historical perspective is needed to understand how these attacks against Google and others are merely an extension of spying activity that has been documented at least since 2001.

There is a group of foreign intelligence analysts whose job it is to keep an eye on China and interpret what is going on there. Since 2001 these analysts have devoted their efforts to understanding China?s thinking on modern warfare and, in particular, Information Warfare. The body of knowledge they have to work with is extensive and surprising in the level of logic and careful consideration that China?s military theoreticians have applied to what they call the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

Let?s go back a couple of thousand years and examine Sun Tsu?s original treatise on The Art of War. Indeed, Sun Tzu devoted a separate section of The Art of War to the employment of spies.

In his book The Craft of Intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, father of the CIA, writes:

?It is no wonder that Sun Tzu?s book is a favorite of Mao-Tse-tung and is required reading for Chinese Communist tacticians. In their conduct of military campaigns and of intelligence collection, they clearly put into practice the teachings of Sun Tzu,?

This from the man in charge of the United States? intelligence operations during the Cold War when China and the USSR were his primary adversaries.

In his 2004 paper ?Sun Tzu?s Strategic Thought and Its Inspiration for Informationized Warfare? presented at the Sixth International Seminar on Sun Tzu?s Art of War, Chai Yuqui of the Nanjiing Army Command Academy called Sun Tzu a grand strategist without parallel in history. (Virtual Dragon p333)

Chinese theoreticians have been considering the implications of Information warfare for two decades

According to China researcher Timothy L. Thomas (author of Decoding the Virtual Dragon, a publication of the US Army?s Foreign Military Studies Office), Dr. Shen Weiguang is known in China as the father of Information Warfare (IW) theory. In 1995, Shen wrote an introductory article on IW for the PLA Daily Newspaper. In it Shen states that the main target of IW is the enemy?s cognitive and trust systems and the goal is to exert control over his actions.

Thomas discovered more interesting thinking in a 2004 article by General Xu Xiaoyan, the former head of the Communications Department of the Chinese General Staff. Xu dissects the realm of Information Warfare. At the granular level he points out the need for:

?Network confrontation technology – intercepting, utilizing, corrupting, and damaging the enemy?s information and using false information, viruses, and other means to sabotage normal information system functions through computer networks.? (Virtual Dragon p. 66)

Thomas goes on to offer the following observations:

?If Xu?s suggestions were accepted, then one might expect to see more active reconnaissance and intelligence activities on the part of the PLA (as seems to be occurring!)?

That exclamation point is Thomas?s and written after Titan Rain(2004) but before the GhostNet report on Chinese hacking of the Dalai Lama?s network (2009).

China is engaging in systematic industrial and military espionage via the Internet. Do not be surprised as more and more organizations announce that they too have been targets. For that matter, do you know if your own organization has been the victim of Chinese cyber spying?

Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst based in Birmingham, MI. He has presented on the topics of cyber threats and cyber defense in 28 countries on six continents. He writes the ThreatChaos blog. His first book, Surviving Cyber War, is due to be published by Government Institutes in mid 2010. a>>