Their economic policy, their interests. America shouldnt be so abrasive , and should be accommodating. In light of the British cooperation to American policy thus far. Obama should adopt a more pragmatic visage.
China-UK (Britain) Geopolitics and Economics: News & Discussions
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Correctly, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is mutual beneficial to all joined members, but American even oppose and boycott it. American, America, Americ, Ameri......less and less legitimacy in world affairs.
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How China's Night Dragon cyber army has infiltrated every corner of Britain: Forget Edward Snowden... a chilling new book by the BBC's top security expert lays bare the biggest internet hack in history
PUBLISHED: 21:02 GMT, 6 June 2015 | UPDATED: 09:36 GMT, 7 June 2015
126
View comments
Back in May 2004, Shawn Carpenter, a computer intrusion expert at Sandia National Laboratories – which work on the USA's nuclear weapons programme – began investigating a cyber security breach.
He had seen similar attacks on defence giant Lockheed Martin, which controls Sandia. Whoever was behind them was good – grabbing what they wanted in moments and always leaving a backdoor open so they could return.
Carpenter used a technique called 'back-hacking' to pursue the attackers online, all the way through Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea where they stashed their stolen files to their source – Guangdong in southern China.
Scroll down for video
+5
Titan Rain - the biggest cyber espionage campaign in history - allowed China to plunder priceless military and commercial secrets from the West
Carpenter installed code on the hackers' machine which sent an email every time they were active. Two weeks later, he had 23,000 messages. This was much more than one individual. It was a huge team working all hours.
Carpenter had uncovered Titan Rain – the biggest cyber espionage campaign in history, and part of a programme which allowed China to plunder priceless military and commercial secrets from the West.
Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole secrets ranging from America's stealth bomber blueprints and Coca-Cola's business strategy to British Government briefings and BP geological reports.
RELATED ARTICLES
Share
Titan Rain's reach was vast. Terabytes of data on the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter had been stolen from companies including BAE.
There were at least 500 significant intrusions into the US military. The blueprints for planes, space-based lasers, missile navigation and nuclear submarines had all been stolen. One American said there was not a defence contractor that had not been penetrated.
And it was not just America. An email arrived in the London inbox of a Foreign Office diplomat in October 2003 purporting to come from a Tibetan group campaigning for autonomy from China. An attachment hid a malicious Trojan horse virus that allowed access to parts of the Foreign Office network.
+5
Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole military and commercial secrets from the West
Never revealed before, this was the first serious known intrusion into British Government systems. Officials won't name who they think was responsible, but the email came from Beijing.
The more analysts began to look, the more they found. Britain's cyber security watchdog at the time, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC), warned in June 2005 that the Government and nearly 300 critical businesses – in defence, telecoms and national security – had been hit. But the Foreign Office forbade it from mentioning China for fear of the diplomatic impact.
At the same time a vast Chinese company – which the US had kept out for fear of espionage – was entering into the heart of Britain's technological infrastructure. Fears that it could be a secret information gateway to Beijing led to a secret centre being set up in Oxfordshire to make sure our network remains secure.
Old-school espionage involved breaking into an office to steal files, but modern spying has adapted. The first step is emailing someone at the target organisation, perhaps posing as a colleague, and tricking them into downloading an attachment that allows hackers into the system.
One specialist will search for likely targets, another remotely copies and removes files to an anonymous electronic 'safe house'. Information is then retrieved by spies in Shanghai, Moscow, Tel Aviv or even Cheltenham, home to GCHQ.
The beauty is that this can be done from the other side of the world – and if you are lucky, no one will ever know you were there.
The most notorious group of cyber-spies was code-named APT1 – investigators found evidence of them in the systems of 141 companies in the English-speaking world.
Once inside, APT1 hackers stayed for an average of 356 days – and in one case roamed for a remarkable four years and ten months.
A new drug or aircraft engine costing millions in research can be siphoned off in a few moments.
Western experts started talking about heavily protected Chinese research institutes and the companies linked to them suddenly making huge leaps forward. US experts point out that China achieved the advanced skill of making a submarine move quietly far faster than the US or Russia.
+5
The most notorious group of cyber-spies was code-named APT1 – investigators found evidence of them in the systems of 141 companies in the English-speaking world
The Chinese J-20 stealth aircraft arrived around a decade after Chinese hackers compromised a US research facility. And when Coca-Cola was negotiating the multi-billion-dollar purchase of a Chinese company, the APT1 group is believed to have got hold of its negotiating strategy. The bid failed.
A different campaign by a group called Night Dragon targeted BP, Shell and Exxon in search of highly valuable geological data about gas and oil prospects – gold-dust to resource-hungry China.
The language was apocalyptic: 'The greatest transfer of wealth in history' is how Keith Alexander, then-director of America's National Security Agency, described cyber espionage in 2012. Others feared as much as a trillion dollars worth of damage. But by following the data trail left by APT1, investigators tracked them to a door in a down- at-heel part of Shanghai that housed Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army. Inside, hundreds worked in a 130,000 sq ft building.
One blog posting by a 25-year-old hacker described a world of long hours, low pay and boredom. He wore a uniform but lived in a dorm and had little time for anything other than work or surfing the internet. 'I want to escape,' he wrote.
GCHQ and the NSA spied on the spies, remotely switching on the webcam of an attacker's computer to see them at work. In 2014, the US Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of charging five members of PLA 61398 with hacking. The FBI issued 'Cyber's Most Wanted' posters featuring photos of the hackers, including one who used the pseudonym UglyGorilla. In a deliberately provocative move, two were pictured in PLA uniform.
Meanwhile, Western companies rarely admit they have been breached. Such an admission would hit the share price straight away, while the actual cost in terms of intellectual property theft may not become apparent for years. By then, directors will almost certainly have moved on, their bonuses intact. But the final cost can be immense.
In 2004, a British employee of the Canadian telecoms giant Nortel became curious about a senior executive downloading documents connected with his work. When he emailed to offer help, the executive replied tersely: 'I don't know what you are talking about.'
+5
Keith Alexander, the then-director of America's National Security Agency, said it was 'the greatest transfer of wealth in history'
Nortel alerted security expert Brian Shields, who found hackers had used the accounts of seven executives in Canada to send more than 1,500 documents to China over the previous six months – with evidence of theft going back to 2000. Shields was already aware of the threat – Nortel had been trying to get into the Chinese market since the 1990s when concerns became immediately apparent. One executive suspected his faxes were being monitored. Others had their luggage searched and laptops examined.
Shields was also part of the Network Security Information Exchange, bringing together governments and the private sector. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Cisco and British Telecom met the FBI, CIA, NSA and Britain's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) in Washington every other month.
Their discussions are classified, but there's little doubt they were dominated by the emergence of a large-scale, sophisticated Chinese threat. Shields reported back to his superiors that the Chinese were stealing everything: research and development, pricing and sales plans, customer information. At the time, Nortel was losing contracts to a new Chinese company, Huawei, which consistently bid 30 per cent less to do the same work.
It is impossible to blame cyber espionage for Nortel's decline and Huawei's rise – the company has come from nowhere to being perhaps the largest telecoms equipment company in the world, doing everything from selling smartphones to laying fibre-optic cables in the ocean.
Shields does not believe Huawei itself was hacking Nortel – he thinks the Chinese state was responsible. Yet the result was the same – Nortel began to fall apart. Shields lost his job to cost-cutting, but not before drafting a 15-page letter to the chief executive: 'I am certain the Chinese are inside Nortel's network,' he wrote. 'They have free rein to take whatever they want and have for a long time… unfair Chinese competition is running this company out of existence.'
It was too late. In January 2009, Nortel – which employed 90,000 worldwide and once made up a third of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange – filed for bankruptcy.
In Britain, spies faced a new headache within months of the rogue Tibetan email to the Foreign Office in 2003. Huawei was signing a major deal to work with BT and there was confusion in Westminster about what to do. Some warned of the dangers, but it was only after the deal was signed that concerns –reported in this newspaper – grew that China could use Huawei to spy on communications, or hit a 'kill switch' to turn them off completely.
On the third floor of a nondescript office in a business park in Banbury, Oxfordshire, two thick doors costing £30,000 each reveal that it is secured to 'List X' standard – and cleared to contain classified information.
The first door takes you into a room reminiscent of most offices. Behind an everyday reception are a few cubicles where people tap quietly on laptops. But electronic equipment must be stored in lockers, passes swiped, and a PIN entered in order to go through the second door. This inner sanctum is Top Secret: and no one from China is allowed to enter unescorted.
+5
Canadian telecoms giant Nortel contracts to a new Chinese company, Huawei (pictured), which consistently bid 30 per cent less to do the same work
The Cyber Security Evaluation Centre – or The Cell – is paid for by Huawei and is the front line in a global debate over computer security which pits China against America, with Britain in the middle. Fear of espionage has kept Huawei out of America's telecoms infrastructure. This is the place where Britain tries to ensure it has not made a mistake by letting it in.
The inner sanctum is where the telecoms kit Huawei plans to install in Britain is tested: its code analysed and hardware – mobile phone base stations and the like – taken apart, photographed and weighed in a search for modifications.
Further inside, there is a locked steel cage, monitored by CCTV, holding a single computer terminal. This is the company's most precious asset, the source code that runs its equipment. A one-way diode means the encrypted code can flow into the computer to be examined, but not out. A two-man rule operates, so a Chinese employee of the company has one half of the password to decrypt the material, a security-cleared Briton has the other.
Pictures from the CCTV are beamed to Shenzhen, home of Huawei's headquarters, a vast campus in a place that has gone from small border town to a metropolis of 15 million people in a generation.
Its network control centre looks like mission control at Nasa. Dozens of operators watch screens which display the flow of much of the world's communications. Nowhere is the sense more clear that Huawei is everywhere.
'When you walk around the Huawei campus, you are staring into China's future,' wrote one US diplomat. A visiting Western executive had a different thought: 'We're screwed.'
Huawei has always denied espionage and points out that being caught spying would be commercial suicide. The same would apply to hitting a kill switch.
Yet a document called the National Risk Register outlines what could happen to Britain if it did. A section, called 'transition to war', relates to the possibility of China shutting Britain down by switching off all Huawei kit (and it would not necessarily need the connivance of the company to do so). This could take down as much as half the British network for days.
Two years ago, Britain's Intelligence and Security Committee's report on Huawei was overshadowed by Edward Snowden's revelations about Western spying, which has dominated the debate over cyber spying ever since.
In the past few days, however, Washington revealed that the personal records of four million government employees had been stolen. The source of the cyber espionage, they suggested, was China.
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
- Whistleblower Shawn Carpenter uncovered Chinese cyber-espionage ring
- Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole secrets from the West
- Code-named Titan Rain, it is the biggest cyber espionage hack in history
- Elite group of hackers plundered secrets from141 companies in the West
PUBLISHED: 21:02 GMT, 6 June 2015 | UPDATED: 09:36 GMT, 7 June 2015
126
View comments
Back in May 2004, Shawn Carpenter, a computer intrusion expert at Sandia National Laboratories – which work on the USA's nuclear weapons programme – began investigating a cyber security breach.
He had seen similar attacks on defence giant Lockheed Martin, which controls Sandia. Whoever was behind them was good – grabbing what they wanted in moments and always leaving a backdoor open so they could return.
Carpenter used a technique called 'back-hacking' to pursue the attackers online, all the way through Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea where they stashed their stolen files to their source – Guangdong in southern China.
Scroll down for video
+5
Titan Rain - the biggest cyber espionage campaign in history - allowed China to plunder priceless military and commercial secrets from the West
Carpenter installed code on the hackers' machine which sent an email every time they were active. Two weeks later, he had 23,000 messages. This was much more than one individual. It was a huge team working all hours.
Carpenter had uncovered Titan Rain – the biggest cyber espionage campaign in history, and part of a programme which allowed China to plunder priceless military and commercial secrets from the West.
Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole secrets ranging from America's stealth bomber blueprints and Coca-Cola's business strategy to British Government briefings and BP geological reports.
RELATED ARTICLES
U.S. government suspects Chinese hackers stole THREE DECADES...
Hacking of US government 'is a warning for Britain': Cyber...
Share
Titan Rain's reach was vast. Terabytes of data on the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter had been stolen from companies including BAE.
There were at least 500 significant intrusions into the US military. The blueprints for planes, space-based lasers, missile navigation and nuclear submarines had all been stolen. One American said there was not a defence contractor that had not been penetrated.
And it was not just America. An email arrived in the London inbox of a Foreign Office diplomat in October 2003 purporting to come from a Tibetan group campaigning for autonomy from China. An attachment hid a malicious Trojan horse virus that allowed access to parts of the Foreign Office network.
+5
Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole military and commercial secrets from the West
Never revealed before, this was the first serious known intrusion into British Government systems. Officials won't name who they think was responsible, but the email came from Beijing.
The more analysts began to look, the more they found. Britain's cyber security watchdog at the time, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC), warned in June 2005 that the Government and nearly 300 critical businesses – in defence, telecoms and national security – had been hit. But the Foreign Office forbade it from mentioning China for fear of the diplomatic impact.
At the same time a vast Chinese company – which the US had kept out for fear of espionage – was entering into the heart of Britain's technological infrastructure. Fears that it could be a secret information gateway to Beijing led to a secret centre being set up in Oxfordshire to make sure our network remains secure.
Old-school espionage involved breaking into an office to steal files, but modern spying has adapted. The first step is emailing someone at the target organisation, perhaps posing as a colleague, and tricking them into downloading an attachment that allows hackers into the system.
One specialist will search for likely targets, another remotely copies and removes files to an anonymous electronic 'safe house'. Information is then retrieved by spies in Shanghai, Moscow, Tel Aviv or even Cheltenham, home to GCHQ.
The beauty is that this can be done from the other side of the world – and if you are lucky, no one will ever know you were there.
The most notorious group of cyber-spies was code-named APT1 – investigators found evidence of them in the systems of 141 companies in the English-speaking world.
Once inside, APT1 hackers stayed for an average of 356 days – and in one case roamed for a remarkable four years and ten months.
A new drug or aircraft engine costing millions in research can be siphoned off in a few moments.
Western experts started talking about heavily protected Chinese research institutes and the companies linked to them suddenly making huge leaps forward. US experts point out that China achieved the advanced skill of making a submarine move quietly far faster than the US or Russia.
+5
The most notorious group of cyber-spies was code-named APT1 – investigators found evidence of them in the systems of 141 companies in the English-speaking world
The Chinese J-20 stealth aircraft arrived around a decade after Chinese hackers compromised a US research facility. And when Coca-Cola was negotiating the multi-billion-dollar purchase of a Chinese company, the APT1 group is believed to have got hold of its negotiating strategy. The bid failed.
A different campaign by a group called Night Dragon targeted BP, Shell and Exxon in search of highly valuable geological data about gas and oil prospects – gold-dust to resource-hungry China.
The language was apocalyptic: 'The greatest transfer of wealth in history' is how Keith Alexander, then-director of America's National Security Agency, described cyber espionage in 2012. Others feared as much as a trillion dollars worth of damage. But by following the data trail left by APT1, investigators tracked them to a door in a down- at-heel part of Shanghai that housed Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army. Inside, hundreds worked in a 130,000 sq ft building.
One blog posting by a 25-year-old hacker described a world of long hours, low pay and boredom. He wore a uniform but lived in a dorm and had little time for anything other than work or surfing the internet. 'I want to escape,' he wrote.
GCHQ and the NSA spied on the spies, remotely switching on the webcam of an attacker's computer to see them at work. In 2014, the US Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of charging five members of PLA 61398 with hacking. The FBI issued 'Cyber's Most Wanted' posters featuring photos of the hackers, including one who used the pseudonym UglyGorilla. In a deliberately provocative move, two were pictured in PLA uniform.
Meanwhile, Western companies rarely admit they have been breached. Such an admission would hit the share price straight away, while the actual cost in terms of intellectual property theft may not become apparent for years. By then, directors will almost certainly have moved on, their bonuses intact. But the final cost can be immense.
In 2004, a British employee of the Canadian telecoms giant Nortel became curious about a senior executive downloading documents connected with his work. When he emailed to offer help, the executive replied tersely: 'I don't know what you are talking about.'
+5
Keith Alexander, the then-director of America's National Security Agency, said it was 'the greatest transfer of wealth in history'
Nortel alerted security expert Brian Shields, who found hackers had used the accounts of seven executives in Canada to send more than 1,500 documents to China over the previous six months – with evidence of theft going back to 2000. Shields was already aware of the threat – Nortel had been trying to get into the Chinese market since the 1990s when concerns became immediately apparent. One executive suspected his faxes were being monitored. Others had their luggage searched and laptops examined.
Shields was also part of the Network Security Information Exchange, bringing together governments and the private sector. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Cisco and British Telecom met the FBI, CIA, NSA and Britain's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) in Washington every other month.
Their discussions are classified, but there's little doubt they were dominated by the emergence of a large-scale, sophisticated Chinese threat. Shields reported back to his superiors that the Chinese were stealing everything: research and development, pricing and sales plans, customer information. At the time, Nortel was losing contracts to a new Chinese company, Huawei, which consistently bid 30 per cent less to do the same work.
It is impossible to blame cyber espionage for Nortel's decline and Huawei's rise – the company has come from nowhere to being perhaps the largest telecoms equipment company in the world, doing everything from selling smartphones to laying fibre-optic cables in the ocean.
Shields does not believe Huawei itself was hacking Nortel – he thinks the Chinese state was responsible. Yet the result was the same – Nortel began to fall apart. Shields lost his job to cost-cutting, but not before drafting a 15-page letter to the chief executive: 'I am certain the Chinese are inside Nortel's network,' he wrote. 'They have free rein to take whatever they want and have for a long time… unfair Chinese competition is running this company out of existence.'
It was too late. In January 2009, Nortel – which employed 90,000 worldwide and once made up a third of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange – filed for bankruptcy.
In Britain, spies faced a new headache within months of the rogue Tibetan email to the Foreign Office in 2003. Huawei was signing a major deal to work with BT and there was confusion in Westminster about what to do. Some warned of the dangers, but it was only after the deal was signed that concerns –reported in this newspaper – grew that China could use Huawei to spy on communications, or hit a 'kill switch' to turn them off completely.
On the third floor of a nondescript office in a business park in Banbury, Oxfordshire, two thick doors costing £30,000 each reveal that it is secured to 'List X' standard – and cleared to contain classified information.
The first door takes you into a room reminiscent of most offices. Behind an everyday reception are a few cubicles where people tap quietly on laptops. But electronic equipment must be stored in lockers, passes swiped, and a PIN entered in order to go through the second door. This inner sanctum is Top Secret: and no one from China is allowed to enter unescorted.
+5
Canadian telecoms giant Nortel contracts to a new Chinese company, Huawei (pictured), which consistently bid 30 per cent less to do the same work
The Cyber Security Evaluation Centre – or The Cell – is paid for by Huawei and is the front line in a global debate over computer security which pits China against America, with Britain in the middle. Fear of espionage has kept Huawei out of America's telecoms infrastructure. This is the place where Britain tries to ensure it has not made a mistake by letting it in.
The inner sanctum is where the telecoms kit Huawei plans to install in Britain is tested: its code analysed and hardware – mobile phone base stations and the like – taken apart, photographed and weighed in a search for modifications.
Further inside, there is a locked steel cage, monitored by CCTV, holding a single computer terminal. This is the company's most precious asset, the source code that runs its equipment. A one-way diode means the encrypted code can flow into the computer to be examined, but not out. A two-man rule operates, so a Chinese employee of the company has one half of the password to decrypt the material, a security-cleared Briton has the other.
Pictures from the CCTV are beamed to Shenzhen, home of Huawei's headquarters, a vast campus in a place that has gone from small border town to a metropolis of 15 million people in a generation.
Its network control centre looks like mission control at Nasa. Dozens of operators watch screens which display the flow of much of the world's communications. Nowhere is the sense more clear that Huawei is everywhere.
'When you walk around the Huawei campus, you are staring into China's future,' wrote one US diplomat. A visiting Western executive had a different thought: 'We're screwed.'
Huawei has always denied espionage and points out that being caught spying would be commercial suicide. The same would apply to hitting a kill switch.
Yet a document called the National Risk Register outlines what could happen to Britain if it did. A section, called 'transition to war', relates to the possibility of China shutting Britain down by switching off all Huawei kit (and it would not necessarily need the connivance of the company to do so). This could take down as much as half the British network for days.
Two years ago, Britain's Intelligence and Security Committee's report on Huawei was overshadowed by Edward Snowden's revelations about Western spying, which has dominated the debate over cyber spying ever since.
In the past few days, however, Washington revealed that the personal records of four million government employees had been stolen. The source of the cyber espionage, they suggested, was China.
- Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies by Gordon Corera is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on June 25, priced £20.
- Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until June 28, 2015. Order at Mail Book Shop – p&p is free on orders over £12.
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pkd
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US data hack is 'a different form of the Cold War'
- ANDREA SHALAL, REUTERS
- JUN. 6, 2015, 11:53 AM
- 758
'We should be very clear: China is at virtual war with the United States'
US official on China hacking government database: 'This is deep'
Cybercriminals' holy grail is now a prime espionage target
A massive breach of US federal computer networks disclosed this week is the latest in a flood of attacks by suspected Chinese hackers aimed at grabbing personal data, industrial secrets, and weapons plans from government and private computers.
The Obama administration on Thursday disclosed the breach of computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management and said the records of up to 4 million current and former federal employees may have been compromised.
US officials have said on condition of anonymity they believe the hackers are based in China, but Washington has not publicly blamed Beijing at a time when tensions are high over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.
China has denied involvement.
It was the second computer break-in in less than a year at the OPM, the federal government's personnel office. The first breach has been linked to earlier thefts of personal data from millions of records at Anthem Inc, the second largest US health insurer, an attack also blamed on Chinese hackers, and Premera Blue Cross, a healthcare services provider.
Kristoffer Tripplaar-Pool/Getty ImagesPresident Barack Obama delivers remarks at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) on January 13, 2015, in Arlington, Virginia.
"It's a different form of Cold War at this point," said Rob Eggebrecht, cofounder and chief executive of Denver-based InteliSecure, a private cybersecurity firm.
Eggebrecht said his firm had seen a spike in attacks on private-company networks by Chinese actors over the past three months. The latest was a previously undisclosed breach at a US pharmaceutical group, which cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars in sensitive research and development work.
Eggebrecht declined to identify the firm, which he said only learned of the major breach within the last 72 hours.
"We've seen a huge uptick in opportunistic exfiltration of high-value data," he said, adding that the attack on the pharma company involved malicious software installed together with the Chinese-language search engine Baidu.
"DIZZYING RATE"
REUTERS / Kevin LamarquePresident Barack Obama holds a round table with business leaders at the Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University in Palo Alta, California, February 13, 2015.
Admiral James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a cyber conference at West Point military academy last month that US adversaries like China and Russia were rapidly increasing their assaults on military networks.
"We're hemorrhaging information at a dizzying rate, evidenced by the uncanny similarity of some of our potential adversaries' new platforms to those we've been developing," said Winnefeld, one of a growing number of US officials who argue for striking back at attackers to create more of a deterrent.
China has in recent years introduced two new stealth fighters that analysts say bear a striking resemblance to the F-22 and F-35 built by Lockheed Martin Corp. Lockheed redoubled security efforts focused on suppliers after a "significant and tenacious" attack on its computer networks in 2011 that was enabled by lax security at a supplier.
ReutersJ-10 fighter jets from the August 1st Aerobatics Team of the People's Liberation Army Air Force perform during the 10th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, November 11, 2014.
US senators have added $200 million in funding to their proposed fiscal 2016 budget to fund a detailed study of the cyber vulnerabilities of major weapons systems.
The move came after the Pentagon's chief weapons tester told Congress that nearly every major weapons program tested in 2014 showed "significant vulnerabilities" to cyber attack, including misconfigured and unpatched software.
US government officials and cyber analysts say Chinese hackers are using high-tech tactics to build massive databases that could be used for traditional espionage goals, such as recruiting spies, or gaining access to secure data on other networks.
The latest incident gives hackers access to a treasure trove of personal information, including birthdates, Social Security numbers, previous addresses, and security clearances.
REUTERS/Jim UrquhartAn analyst looks at code in the malware lab of a cyber security defense lab at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho, September 29, 2011.
All that data could help hackers identify information about specific targets, including potential passwords for websites that may be portals to information about weapons systems or other research data.
"They can dig down into that data and learn more about the individuals, what their hobbies are, what their vices are, what skeletons they have in their closet," said Babak Pasdar, president and chief executive of Bat Blue Network, a cybersecurity firm.
He said he was involved in a recent case in which hackers gained access to private data of a website administrator by finding passwords on a public website linked to the person's hobby.
"This empowers the malevolent cyber actor to target a huge number of people with phishing and other schemes to reel in information," said one US defense official. "The more targets you have, the more likely you are to score."
(Editing by Doina Chiacu and Mark Trevelyan)
Read more: US data hack is 'a different form of the Cold War' - Business Insider
Khalid Newazi
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So, maybe we can buy some F-35 for cheap prices!
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After teachers, UK asks China for math workbooks
2015-08-24
It seems the exploration into the possibility of introducing Chinese teaching methods to Britain isn't going to end along with the just finished BBC documentary Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, in which five Chinese teachers were invited to teach a class of 50 students in a British high school for one month.
On Wednesday in Shanghai, the East China Normal University Press Ltd held a press conference at the Shanghai Book Fair (August 19-25) to announce that on August 10, HarperCollins Publishers had published a British version of East China Normal University Press' math workbook for Shanghai students.
The original Chinese math workbook series, titled Yi Ke Yi Lian (Lit: one lesson one exercise), is comprised of 12 volumes catering to students from grades 1-12. The British version has a new name, The Shanghai Maths Project and comprises 11 volumes aimed at the British curriculum.
According to Wang Yan, director of East China Normal University Press, after the first volume on August 10, the next volume will come out in late August and the third and fourth volumes in October.
In the future, the publishing house plans to adapt new versions for South Korean, Russian and Bulgarian schools, Wang said.
Since 1995, the Yi Ke Yi Lian series, which includes workbooks for math, Chinese and English, has become a famous brand among Shanghai students, to the point it takes up almost 80 percent of the Shanghai market.
In 2009 and 2012, Shanghai students ranked first place in the Program for International Student Assessment, a triennial international survey that evaluates education systems worldwide.
The results of the survey mad Chinese education the center of global discussion. Li Shiqi, a math professor and PhD advisor at East China Normal University, told the Global Times that since 2009, countries such as the US, UK and Spain have visited Shanghai and joined math education forums in the city.
In February, HarperCollins Publishers, one of the five largest English-language publishing houses in the world, signed a contract with East China Normal University Press to begin working on The Shanghai Maths Project. The project is being led by Fan Lianghuo, an education professor at the University of Southampton who coauthored How Chinese Learn Mathmatics and How Chinese Teach Mathematics with math professors from the US and China.
"Some people tend to think Chinese workbooks on teach through the use of repetition and memorization, but this is wrong," said Li.
"We believe in theory that practice make perfect, and so in our workbook we try different ways to designing questions, which helps students understand what is being taught."
To avoid culture differences, The British version has made several changes from the Chinese version while maintaining the original difficulty level. For instance, in a match game, the Chinese version matches a bird to a cage and a cat to a fish, but the British version matches a bird to a tree and a cat to a mouse. In addition, the British version will also include some information that isn't contained in the Chinese book due to the different curriculums in the two countries.
Michael Herd, from Scotland, has been teaching math in an international school in Shanghai for seven years. He admitted that there are huge differences in teaching method between the UK and China, as the former is very much student-focused while the latter is much result-driven.
"I feel in the UK the teachers are more worried about how to make the students feel good about themselves rather than try to get them to perform the best academically," said Herd.
Hearing about the chaotic scenes in the BBC documentary that took place while students were in class, Mike said that this may be because the British students knew the program was purely experimental and so didn't take it that seriously.
When asked about whether he will consider using The Shanghai Maths Project workbooks, Herd said the he will get a copy to read through before he makes any decisions.
"Certainly I'm sure that the book would be probably very useful," said Herd.
"It probably can be used as an additional resource, but I'm not so sure whether it will replace resources that we already have."
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Smart Brits... They can always sense the next superpower.
2015-08-24
It seems the exploration into the possibility of introducing Chinese teaching methods to Britain isn't going to end along with the just finished BBC documentary Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, in which five Chinese teachers were invited to teach a class of 50 students in a British high school for one month.
On Wednesday in Shanghai, the East China Normal University Press Ltd held a press conference at the Shanghai Book Fair (August 19-25) to announce that on August 10, HarperCollins Publishers had published a British version of East China Normal University Press' math workbook for Shanghai students.
The original Chinese math workbook series, titled Yi Ke Yi Lian (Lit: one lesson one exercise), is comprised of 12 volumes catering to students from grades 1-12. The British version has a new name, The Shanghai Maths Project and comprises 11 volumes aimed at the British curriculum.
According to Wang Yan, director of East China Normal University Press, after the first volume on August 10, the next volume will come out in late August and the third and fourth volumes in October.
In the future, the publishing house plans to adapt new versions for South Korean, Russian and Bulgarian schools, Wang said.
Since 1995, the Yi Ke Yi Lian series, which includes workbooks for math, Chinese and English, has become a famous brand among Shanghai students, to the point it takes up almost 80 percent of the Shanghai market.
In 2009 and 2012, Shanghai students ranked first place in the Program for International Student Assessment, a triennial international survey that evaluates education systems worldwide.
The results of the survey mad Chinese education the center of global discussion. Li Shiqi, a math professor and PhD advisor at East China Normal University, told the Global Times that since 2009, countries such as the US, UK and Spain have visited Shanghai and joined math education forums in the city.
In February, HarperCollins Publishers, one of the five largest English-language publishing houses in the world, signed a contract with East China Normal University Press to begin working on The Shanghai Maths Project. The project is being led by Fan Lianghuo, an education professor at the University of Southampton who coauthored How Chinese Learn Mathmatics and How Chinese Teach Mathematics with math professors from the US and China.
"Some people tend to think Chinese workbooks on teach through the use of repetition and memorization, but this is wrong," said Li.
"We believe in theory that practice make perfect, and so in our workbook we try different ways to designing questions, which helps students understand what is being taught."
To avoid culture differences, The British version has made several changes from the Chinese version while maintaining the original difficulty level. For instance, in a match game, the Chinese version matches a bird to a cage and a cat to a fish, but the British version matches a bird to a tree and a cat to a mouse. In addition, the British version will also include some information that isn't contained in the Chinese book due to the different curriculums in the two countries.
Michael Herd, from Scotland, has been teaching math in an international school in Shanghai for seven years. He admitted that there are huge differences in teaching method between the UK and China, as the former is very much student-focused while the latter is much result-driven.
"I feel in the UK the teachers are more worried about how to make the students feel good about themselves rather than try to get them to perform the best academically," said Herd.
Hearing about the chaotic scenes in the BBC documentary that took place while students were in class, Mike said that this may be because the British students knew the program was purely experimental and so didn't take it that seriously.
When asked about whether he will consider using The Shanghai Maths Project workbooks, Herd said the he will get a copy to read through before he makes any decisions.
"Certainly I'm sure that the book would be probably very useful," said Herd.
"It probably can be used as an additional resource, but I'm not so sure whether it will replace resources that we already have."
***
Smart Brits... They can always sense the next superpower.
ahojunk
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I have a lot of respect for the Brits.
To to be able to learn from others, one has to be humble.
The people who make the most progress are those who are willing to listen and learn from others.
IMHO, a reason that China made lots of progress in the last 35 years was a humbleness and willingness to learn from other countries.
To to be able to learn from others, one has to be humble.
The people who make the most progress are those who are willing to listen and learn from others.
IMHO, a reason that China made lots of progress in the last 35 years was a humbleness and willingness to learn from other countries.
TaiShang
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In terms of learning whatever available, Brits are a good example for us.
Just do not give a bloody hell what others might call, get/learn/adopt as much as one can.
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大汉奸柳传志
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Sometimes I got the feeling that the Brits are really the kinds of people who have “seen it all”.
They feel much more secure about themselves than the Americans who are lately getting more insecure and paranoid everyday
Economic superpower
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It's one of the reasons the British became the dominant empire beating the other European empires.
Americans, Russians, French are too arrogant and when they fall, they will never get back up as they don't have the ability or humbleness to see their own weakness. They are blinded by their own arrogance.
British are pretty unique. They learnt alot from others and moulded their own system.
TaiShang
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China, US, UK join forces on human gene editing
September 15, 2015
It's been announced a group of Chinese scientists are going to be joining an expert panel later this year to lay out guidelines for a controversial new procedure connected to human genome research.
Double helix structure of DNA. [Photo: chinanews.com]
The Chinese Academy of Sciences will join other scientists from the UK and the US at an international summit in Washington in early December to discuss a process called human gene 'editing.'
'Editing' is a new process which has been developed which can allow scientists to alter the smallest parts of human DNA.
This process can allow scientists to alter the human genetic code to allow scientists to potentially eliminate genetic-based diseases.
However, the scientists will be meeting to discuss the ethical and social ramifications of the advancement, with a report due to be released sometime next year.
September 15, 2015
It's been announced a group of Chinese scientists are going to be joining an expert panel later this year to lay out guidelines for a controversial new procedure connected to human genome research.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences will join other scientists from the UK and the US at an international summit in Washington in early December to discuss a process called human gene 'editing.'
'Editing' is a new process which has been developed which can allow scientists to alter the smallest parts of human DNA.
This process can allow scientists to alter the human genetic code to allow scientists to potentially eliminate genetic-based diseases.
However, the scientists will be meeting to discuss the ethical and social ramifications of the advancement, with a report due to be released sometime next year.
