Well, they’ve done it again. With impunity, China has hacked into our government’s computer networks, and stolen sensitive information from four million current and past federal employees.
Although we’ve been attacked in the past by nefarious actors like Russia and North Korea and Iran, this has all the markings of our good friends at the PRC (Peoples’ Republic of China). After all, they’ve persistently and flagrantly launched cyber-attacks against the U.S. government and U.S. companies for quite some time now, with basically no retaliatory response from our government.
They do it to steal our industrial and trade secrets. They do it to steal our military secrets. In this case, they’ve hacked into and stolen sensitive information from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which among other things, conducts background checks for anyone in the federal government needing a security clearance. And here’s the thing. When a person undergoes a security clearance, there are other people involved as references, and it appears that they too, and/or their information is at risk as well.
It is believed that sensitive information of up to four million federal employees may be in jeopardy. Their bank records, credit card information, income taxes, health records, family information, you name it, may already be in the hands of the Chinese, or transmitted to shadowy elements for purposes unknown at this time.
Further, it is believed that this sensitive information could be used to approach and possibly compromise federal employees who are in financial difficulties or faced with major healthcare challenges. China may be trying to recruit those who have access to sensitive information to provide intelligence to them. (Although they may be obtaining sufficient intelligence through hacking us, that this isn’t as important as it once was.) The possibilities of nefarious use of hacked information is endless.
How did we find out about this hack in the first place? Well, the Department of Homeland Security has an intrusion detection system which screens federal internet traffic. Its purpose is to identify cyber-attacks. Unfortunately, by the time the detection system detected China’s attack, the sensitive information had already been stolen. Ironically, the intrusion detection system is known as Einstein. (I’m not making this up. This IS the federal government we’re talking about.)
Of course this wasn’t the first, and unfortunately probably won’t be the last, major hack of the U.S. government and U.S. businesses. Among others who have been successfully victimized are Anthem, Sony, Home Depot, JP Morgan, EBay, Target, the IRS, the U.S. military, and many others.
Although most experts believe China is to blame for this cyber-attack (and quite a few of the above-mentioned attacks), China has (sort of) denied that they’re responsible. A Chinese embassy spokesman said accusing China of the attack is “not responsible and counterproductive.” The Chinese spokesman went on to say “cyber-attacks conducted across countries are hard to track and therefore the source of attacks is difficult to identify.” He further stated that hacking can “only be addressed by international cooperation based on mutual trust and mutual respect.”
That’s nice. China did it.
So what should we do? As I often find to be the case, I’m with Charles Krauthammer on this. Back in February, when it was revealed that China had hacked Anthem, his advice was to “go Biblical on them, a hack for a hack.” And when this latest attack was revealed last week, Krauthammer said “China is getting no pushback… it looks as if the technology for hacking sort of exceeds the defense of technologies in this kind of arms race. I think the only thing to do is be extremely aggressive and to go on the offense. Our defense is obviously inadequate.”
So, of course, do everything possible to strengthen our defenses against being hacked. But let it be known, far and wide, that if the United States is cyber-attacked by any state-backed entity, whether it’s China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, whomever, we’ll take down your financial system, electric grid, government communications system, whatever will hurt you far more than you’ve hurt us.
Go Biblical on them. Amen.
