George W. Bush has acknowledged that the US is vulnerable to cyber-attack and said he might raise the issue with Chinese President Hu Jintao when they meet in Sydney on Thursday.
The US president’s comments followed a report in the Financial Times that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had allegedly hacked into the Pentagon’s computer network.
“I’m very aware that a lot of our systems are vulnerable to cyber-attack from a variety of places,” said Mr Bush, who is in Sydney for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit.
Mr Bush said he “may” raise the matter with countries the US suspected of cyber warfare, without acknowledging China’s alleged role in the Pentagon incident.
China has strongly denied that its military was behind the cyber-attack on the US defence department, which was detailed to the FT by current and former US officials. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said the allegations were “absurd” and reflected “cold war thinking”.
Mr Bush said it was important that countries respected each other’s “systems and knowledge base”. “That’s what we expect from people with whom we trade,” he said.
The Pentagon disclosures about, which closed parts of its unclassified computer system in June to deal with the attacks, followed reports in German newspapers of the insertion of spyware – again allegedly by the PLA – into German government computers at the Chancellery and three ministries.
British government officials have spoken of similar attacks. In private comments in 2006 to a meeting of senior business figures and others, Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, said the UK government had been the target of significant hacking attacks from China that were suspected to have been state sponsored.
The Guardian on Wednesday reported that parliament and the Foreign Office had been attacked by hackers.
Security officials have said the targets have not been limited to the government but have also taken in private companies, including in the financial sector.
The Chinese embassy in London did not respond to an FT enquiry yesterday.
Some experts have pointed out that while China has come under scrutiny over the PLA hacking allegations, the US has developed, and is widely believed to use, the same capabilities.
The Pentagon is increasingly concerned because it recognises that cyberspace is one domain that the Chinese can challenge US dominance. China lags behind the US in the more traditional battlespaces of air and sea.
Chinese military strategy has placed increasing emphasis on space and cyberspace as key domains in modern wars where information that flows over networks is central in battle.
“If we look at what the Chinese are doing, assuming that the PLA is behind it, then we are seeing aspects of the PLA... operationalising what they have talked about in theory,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese security issues at the Center for Naval Analyses.
