May 2013

A U.S. report on china says china government and military have targeted US government computers and organizationns as part of an orchestrated cyber espionage campaign.

According to the report, the attacks were focused on "exfiltrating information" that could be immensly advantageous to china's defense and high tech industries.

In february 2013, a US security firm - Mandiant - said that it had linked hundreds of data breaches since 2004 to a chinese hacking team traced to the site of a military unit in Shangai. However, china refuted the claims advanced by the US firm as baseless, adding that such utterances could injure Sino-american relations. China claimed that it had also sufferd hacking like anybody else.

In maarch china announced that its total military expenditure for the year 2012 was
$114 billion, which translated to a increase of 10.4%. But, going by the Pentagon's estimates, china's total military expenditure averaged btween $135 billion and
$215 billion in 2012.

In its report, Mandiant said the cyber attacker Unit 61398, which was "housed" in a chinese military base, is believed to have systematically stollen hundreds of terabytes of data from some 141 organizations around the world.

Meanwhile china has released figures of its defense forces as follows, according to China government white paper:

Soldiers    850,000
Navy        235,000
Airfoce     398,000

These figures sharply contrast the widely believed aggregate total of 2,800,000 personel.

Mnj