Tag Archive for: Aggressive

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Weak Britain reluctant to confront aggressive China

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British history books claim that before the First Opium War against Manchu China in 1839, the Chinese hoped there would be a lot of “talkee-talkee before fightee-fightee”. This time around, it is the British who seek discussions and negotiations before the war of words over China’s alleged human rights abuses spills over into action.

The United States also drew back when similar arguments erupted with China. One reason was that China held $3,399.9 billion of the American Treasury’s foreign exchange reserves. Another factor was the calculation that the American cost of living would shoot up without access to cheap Chinese footwear, clothing, electricals and household goods.

 

No wonder British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy skirted around the subject of China. The 100-page review even hinted that Russia was Britain’s most serious threat and the reason for acquiring high-tech drones and the expensive paraphernalia of cyber warfare and satellites to control space while increasing the stockpile of nuclear warheads by 40 per cent.

No wonder Britain’s response was limited to grieving rhetoric when Beijing imposed sanctions on five ruling Conservative Party MPs, two peers, a barrister and an academic. They can no longer travel to China, and any assets they there will be frozen. “Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike/ Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike”, as in Alexander Pope’s poem, Mr Johnson “noted that China has chosen to sanction individuals and entities that are seeking to shine a light on human rights violations”.

 

Apart from the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, the British PM must have two other controversies in mind. One is Hong Kong, where the citizens’ protests have been continuing unrelentlessly despite Beijing’s crackdown and the enforcement of its harsh new security law, the other the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which Britain excluded from its 5G networks last year as a result of American pressure backed by Britain’s defence establishment. Huawei of course denies any spying activities. While China’s response to the exclusion was muted, it…

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U.S. Tried a More Aggressive Cyberstrategy, and the Feared Attacks Never Came

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From its sprawling new war room inside Fort Meade, not far from Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland, United States Cyber Command dived deep into Russian and Iranian networks in the months before the election, temporarily paralyzing some and knocking ransomware tools offline.

Then it stole Iran’s game plan and, without disclosing the intelligence coup behind the theft, made public a part of Tehran’s playbook when the Iranians began to carry it out.

Now, nearly a week after the polls closed, it is clear that all the warnings of a crippling cyberattack on election infrastructure, or an overwhelming influence operation aimed at American voters, did not come to pass. There were no breaches of voting machines and only modest efforts, it appears, to get inside registration systems.

Interviews with government officials and other experts suggest a number of reasons for the apparent success.

One may be that the United States’ chief adversaries were deterred, convinced that the voting infrastructure was so hardened, Facebook and Twitter were so on alert, and Cyber Command and a small group of American companies were so on the offensive that it was not worth the risk.

But there is another explanation as well: In the 2020 election the distinction between foreign and domestic interference blurred. From early in the campaign, President Trump did more to undermine confidence in the system’s integrity than America’s rivals could have done themselves.

And in the aftermath, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations, amplified by conservative news media outlets, have only intensified, leaving the Russians and the Iranians with the relatively easy task of bouncing his messages back into the echo chamber of social media.

“A lot of the disinformation that voters consume originates from within our own country,” said Jeh C. Johnson, a secretary of homeland security under President Barack Obama. “All foreign adversaries need to do is aid and abet and amplify.”

Mr. Trump and his allies, it turns out, were the chief purveyors of the kind of election misinformation that the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and American intelligence officials were warning about. He was also…

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Taiwan accuses Chinese hackers of aggressive attacks on government agencies – CyberScoop

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  1. Taiwan accuses Chinese hackers of aggressive attacks on government agencies  CyberScoop
  2. Taiwan Accuses Chinese Hackers of Targeting Its Citizens’ Data  Bloomberg
  3. Taiwan says China behind cyberattacks on government agencies, emails  Reuters
  4. Taiwan accuses Chinese hackers of targeting Taiwanese data  The Straits Times
  5. Chinese hackers infiltrate Taiwan gov’t agencies, gains access to thousands of email IDs | Daily Sabah  Daily Sabah
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