Unorthodox Thoughts

The official US stance on being under cyber attack from Chinese nationals, operating out of China and behind the Great Firewall of China, has always puzzled me.

For many years, Chinese nationals/patriots have been attacking Western infrastructure with zealous tenacity; in many cases being directly supported by the Chinese Communist Party and PLA.

I am sure that any person of Chinese descent is feeling a little defensive upon reading this, but my angst is not against the Chinese people in any way.  I am merely corroborating this claim with data from my viewpoint.. that a country doing so much business with the US would so callously allow and support these attacks is an affront to any meaningful cooperation between our governments.  To get an idea of the scale of Chinese cyber attacks, one only needs to pull some metrics.

This data (shown above) comes from Akamai, the world’s largest cloud provider; with more than 80,000 collection points across the planet.  The number of attacks originating in China is more than the rest of the planet combined over a 24 hour period at 365 attacks.  Compare this with the Russian Federation at 21 attacks over the same period.  Every day looks like this in case you are wondering..

You might say, “How can the Chinese government stop these attacks from inside the country?”  The reality is that these attacks aren’t even trying to be stopped, but are being encouraged and in some cases actually funded by the PLA.  If the Chinese government can stop the average citizen from getting information not allowable by the Communist censors, how can it be blind/unable to stop attacks against US institutions?  Answer.. it doesn’t want to stop the attacks because it serves Chinese national interests.

Tags: akamai, china, cyberwar, Great Firewall, hacking, PLA