[Infowarrior] - China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet

[Richard Forno]

February 12, 2010
China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet
By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/asia/12cyberchina.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
BEIJING — Deep inside a Chinese military engineering institute in  
September 2008, a researcher took a break from his duties and decided  
— against official policy — to check his private e-mail messages.  
Among  the new arrivals was an electronic holiday greeting card that  
purported to be from a state defense office.

The researcher clicked on the card to open it. Within minutes,  
secretly implanted computer code enabled an unnamed foreign  
intelligence agency to tap into the databases of the institute in the  
city of Luoyang in central China and spirit away top-secret  
information on Chinese submarines.

So reported Global Times, a Communist Party-backed newspaper with a  
nationalist bent, in a little-noticed December article. The paper  
described the episode as “a major security breach” and quoted one  
government official who complained that such attacks were “ubiquitous”  
in China.

The information could not be independently confirmed, and such leaks  
in the Chinese news media often serve the propaganda or lobbying goals  
of government officials.

Nonetheless, the story is one sign that while much of the rest of the  
world frets about Chinese cyberspying abroad, China is increasingly  
alarmed about the threat that the Internet poses to its security and  
political stability.

In the view of both political analysts and technology experts here and  
in the United States, China’s attempts to tighten its grip on Internet  
use are driven in part by the conviction that the West — and  
particularly the United States — is wielding communications  
innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily and to  
stir dissent internally.

“The United States has already done it, many times,” said Song  
Xiaojun, one of the authors of “Unhappy China,” a 2009 book advocating  
a muscular Chinese foreign policy, which the party’s propaganda  
department is said to promote. He cited the so-called color  
revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia as examples. “It is not really  
regime change, directly,” he said. “It is more like they use the  
Internet to sow chaos.”

State media have vented those concerns more vociferously since  
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month criticized China  
for censorship and called for an investigation of Google’s assertion  
that its databases had been the target of a sophisticated attack from  
China. “China wants to make clear that it too is under serious attack  
from spies on the Internet,” said Cheng Gang, author of the Global  
Times article.

Despite China’s robust technological abilities, its cyberdefenses are  
almost certainly more porous than those of the United States, American  
experts say. To cite one glaring example, even Chinese government  
computers are frequently equipped with pirated software from  
Microsoft, they say. That means many users miss out on security  
upgrades, available to paying users, that fix security breaches  
exploited by hackers.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for most governments. While the  
United States probably has tighter defenses than China, for example,  
experts say it relies more heavily on computers to run its  
infrastructure and so is more vulnerable to an attack.

But for China, worries about how foreign forces might employ the  
Internet and other communications advances to unseat the Communist  
Party are a salient factor in the government’s 15-year effort to  
control those technologies. Chinese leaders are constantly trying to  
balance the economic and social benefits of online freedoms and open  
communications against the desire to preserve social stability and  
prevent organized political opposition.

A distinct shift in favor of more comprehensive controls began nearly  
two years ago and hardened over the past six months, analysts say.

New policies are intended to replace foreign hardware and software  
with homegrown systems that can be more easily controlled and  
protected. Officials are also expanding the reach and resources of  
state-controlled media outlets so they dominate Chinese cyberspace  
with their blogs, videos and news. At the same time, the government is  
beefing up its security apparatus. Officials have justified stronger  
measures by citing various internal threats that they say escalated  
online. Among them: the March 2008 riots in the Tibetan capital,  
Lhasa; reported attempts to disrupt the August 2008 Olympic Games and  
the amassing of more than 10,000 signatures supporting a petition for  
human rights and democratic freedoms, an example of how democracy  
advocates could organize online.

Especially alarming to officials, analysts say, was the role of the  
Internet in ethnic riots last July that left nearly 200 people dead  
and more than 1,700 injured — the worst ethnic violence in recent  
Chinese history. Government reports asserted that terrorists,  
separatists and religious extremists from within and outside the  
country used the Internet to recruit Uighur youth to travel to Urumqi,  
the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, to attack ethnic Han  
citizens.

In August, security and propaganda officials briefed China’s ruling  
Politburo on their view of how the Xinjiang riots developed, according  
to one media executive with high-level government ties. The executive   
spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution for  
discussing delicate political topics.

China’s leaders also reviewed how Iranian antigovernment activists  
used Twitter and other new communication tools to organize large  
street demonstrations against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the  
summer. He said Chinese leaders saw the Iranian protests as an example  
of how the United States could use the new forms of online  
communication in a fashion that could one day be turned against China.

“How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about?” People’s  
Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, asked in a Jan. 24  
editorial. “It was because online warfare launched by America, via  
YouTube video and Twitter micro-blogging, spread rumors, created  
splits, stirred up and sowed discord.”

Since the unrest in Iran and Xinjiang, Chinese leaders accelerated a  
raft of new initiatives, including closing thousands of Web sites,  
tightening censorship of text messages for lewd or “unhealthy” content  
and planning to converge China’s Internet, phone and state television  
networks. They are also carefully cultivating homegrown alternatives  
to foreign computer technologies and foreign-based Web sites like  
YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, all of which Chinese censors now block.  
The government says it needs the new controls to fight pornography,  
piracy and other illegal activity.

In November, nearly 300 government officials and technicians gathered  
in Beijing for a seminar that stressed China’s vulnerability in  
cyberspace.

“It is a long-existing reality that the West is stronger than us in  
terms of information security,” said the seminar training manual,  
posted on the Web site of the Ministry of Public Security.

“Most of the key technology and products in the information security  
sphere are held in the hands of Western countries, which leaves  
China’s important information systems exposed to a bigger chance of  
being attacked and controlled by hostile forces,” the manual said.

The risks of dependence on foreign-made software became clear in 2008  
after Microsoft deployed a new antipiracy program aimed at detecting  
and discouraging unauthorized users of its Windows operating system.  
In China, where an estimated four-fifths of computer software is  
pirated, the program caused millions of computer screens to go dark  
every hour and led to a public outcry.

New government procurement rules require state buyers to give  
preference to Chinese-made computers and communication products, among  
other supplies and services. But James Mulvenon, director of the  
Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a Washington-based  
consulting firm, said such orders were typically ignored.

James A. Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International  
Studies, a Washington-based research group, said China was caught  
between contradictory goals. The authorities want to keep using  
superior Western software so they can engage in espionage and defend  
themselves against foreign infiltration. “But at the same time they  
want to use indigenous software, which is not up to par,” he said.

But China is pushing hard to catch up. Mr. Mulvenon describes China as  
“absolutely the world leader” in development of Internet Protocol  
Version 6 (IPv6) — the successor to the current Internet.

Some suggest China aims to develop a more autonomous system equipped  
with stronger firewalls and filters. China’s leaders “have always had  
the ambition to develop the capability of one big domestic Intranet  
that they could manage more easily, if need be,” one Communist Party  
newspaper editor said. But others suggest China is merely trying, like  
other nations, to respond to the reality that the existing IPv4 global  
Internet, in which the United States commands a disproportionate share  
of addresses, will soon run out of space.

The clearest evidence of China’s determination to wield greater  
control was the virtual communications blackout imposed over Xinjiang  
for six months after the July riots. Nineteen million residents in a  
region more than twice as big as Texas were deprived of text-messaging  
service, international phone calls and Internet access to all but a  
few government-controlled Web sites. The damage to tourism and  
business, not  to mention the disruption to everyday life, was  
significant.

Hu Yong, a Beijing-based media expert, said the government was no  
longer as worried as it once was about the economic impact of  
electronic communication controls.

“Now that is more secondary to their concerns about political and  
social stability,” he said.

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Zhang Jing  
and Xiyun Yang contributed research from Beijing.