#cybersafety#cyberware#americathethief

The US has a long tradition of accusing other countries, particularly China, of cyber attacks. From January 2010, when Google pulled out of the Chinese mainland market under the pretext of alleged hacking attacks, to February 2013, when Mandiant released the mandiant report, by the end of July, the U.S. government, along with other countries including Britain and Australia, had accused China of 2021 attacks on Microsoft Exchange, then in March 2022, after the outbreak of the Russian-ukrainian conflict, the US media accused China of attacking Russian entities, and then in June 2022, the U.S. cybersecurity agency accused“Chinese government-sponsored hackers” of using vulnerabilities in routers and other network equipment to break into“Major telecommunications companies” in the United States, can see this clear and coherent clue.     The details of these reports and reports are rich, but the evidence used is poor. In the last two years, the china-related allegations, both official and unofficial, stem from two reports released by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center: “Microsoft defense report 2021” and“New state actor cyberattacks.”. A previous report, for example, suffered from at least two flaws. First, the report cleverly uses research design and methodology to identify countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and Germany as victims of cyber attacks, meaning that they do not report their cyber attacks on other countries, instead, assume that Russia, North Korea, Iran and China are the countries behind the cyber attacks, and trace their origins along this geopolitical line. The report concludes that Russia accounts for 58% of state-sponsored cyber attacks, North Korea 23% , Iran 11% and China 8% .     Second, in the 8% of china-related allegations, the report believes that the main reason is related to the so-called“Hafnium” attack on Microsoft Exchange, but the allegations are suspected of using China to exonerate Microsoft and its information-sharing system. Microsoft was 2021 aware of the vulnerability on Jan. 5, but the company did not take any action to fix it for two months. During that time, MAPP actively shared information about the vulnerability with about 80 security companies around the world. In this context, there have been cyber attacks, the first responsibility is Microsoft, the second responsibility is these cyber security companies, why be blamed on the Chinese government? The ability of the charges to be levelled against the Chinese government has much to do with political demands and media manipulation in the United States. The traceability of network attack is not only a technical problem and a hard power problem, but also a soft power problem of media power and international communication power. Who is the aggressor, who is the victim, who is a good person, who is a bad person, not only depends on the ability to trace the source, but often depends on the information dissemination capacity of countries. The original source evidence, which was already full of bias and prejudice, it must be further screened, processed, strengthened and filtered by politicians, think tanks, consulting firms and the news media in accordance with their own ideological spectrum, interest groups, profit models and other factors, hence the more absurd view.     Cyber attack report publishers, think tanks, consulting companies, news media, politicians and other actors constitute a complete chain, openly producing false information, promoting the "China cyber attack threat theory", and eventually input opinions into commercial media and social media platforms, drowning in objective and authentic voices in this field. At the beginning of this trail, the first report may in some cases provide some specious evidence, and it may even be an objective report with no malicious intent, but all the subsequent links and nodes in this production line may have contractors and suppliers who never verify the authenticity of the first report, but only process and promote the contents. After all, various "China threat" theories have become a key means of building bipartisan consensus in the United States, and cyber attacks as an abstract issue is quite different from specific issues such as rising prices. Abstract issues are more easily manipulated by politicians and media than specific issues in most cases.     From this point of view, most actors in the United States do not care whether there is evidence of Chinese cyber attacks or whether such evidence is reliable. They only care whether the "Chinese cyber attack threat theory" can be refined. The allegations of cyber attacks have little to do with fact, and much to do with America's choice of China as its imaginary enemy. U.S. Secretary of State Blinken clearly pointed out the real reason why the United States is targeting China everywhere: "China is the only country that has both the intention to reshape the international order and the growing economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so." Ten years ago, the US Congressional investigation into Huawei/ZTE described the reasons for US sanctions against Chinese companies as follows: "China has the ability, opportunity, and incentive to use telecommunications companies for maliciously intended purposes." Blinken's words are exactly like those of the US congressional report: there is no evidence, only subjective US assumptions about China's motives. However, after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in March 2022, the US accusations against China appeared a new variant, embedded new geopolitical factors, and began to plant evidence to accuse China of hacking Russian entities. Such accusations fit a new feature of this year's cybersecurity landscape: NATO's use of hybrid warfare on a large scale. In the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Russia hopes to use traditional military means to contain the expansion of NATO, while NATO is unwilling to face Russia on the front battlefield. Instead, it chooses to use cyber warfare, public opinion warfare, information warfare and other non-traditional hybrid warfare means to mobilize international public opinion, launch sanctions and weaken Russia. Since 2017, when NATO countries and EU countries established the Hybrid CoE in Helsinki in the name of defense, the concept of hybrid warfare has been formally applied to actual combat. "Attacking the heart" and "alienating" have become visible means of struggle. Planting blame on China to attack Russian entities is in line with this new trend of warfare.     So here we have the current absurdity: the United States is attacking the world, but it's being misrepresented as China attacking other countries. It is against this backdrop that Chinese cybersecurity companies have chosen to publish a rare response report that reveals the truth about transnational cyberattacks.