At a Thursday event, Dmitri Alperovitch, president of Asymmetric Cyber Operations LLC, put nation states ahead of other threats such as terrorist groups, hacktivist collectives and organized crime, NextGov reported.

“I don’t believe we have a cyber problem today,” Alperovitch said. “I believe we have a China problem today. I believe we have a Russia problem today.”

Cyberattacks organized by a nation are also easy to deny, Alperovitch said, making a law enforcement or military response difficult.

Estonia was the first country to suffer a coordinated cyberattack on government and financial systems in 2007. Estonian ambassador Marina Kaljurand, then the country’s ambassador to Russia, said the government suspected Russia was behind the attack but that proving it was difficult.

“If the Russian government wasn’t supporting [the attack], it was at least tolerating it,” Kaljurand said according to NextGov.

In response, Estonia reached out to private hacker groups for assistance in shoring up its cyber defenses. The country offered financial support in return, and Kaljurand said trust is key to cybersecurity.

“This cooperation can only be based on trust,” Kaljurand said. “If there is no trust, there cannot be cooperation.”

“To meet our customers’ pressing needs for cloud services, we need to create a data center in line with the government’s carbon emission reduction plans,” said Zhou Chaonan, chairwoman, Range Technology. “HP will give us end-to-end support for data center design as well as cloud technologies to help us open a green data center and further strengthen the economic development of China.”

Range Technology, China’s leading IT service provider, pegged HP’s Critical Facilities Design and Implementation services to design the cloud data center and provide reliable services to its customers.

“Many IT service providers in China are challenged to meet business demands for a high-end, service-based economy,” said Mohan Krishnan, vice president and managing partner, Technology Consulting – Asia Pacific and Japan, HP. “HP will draw on its unrivalled data center design-build experience to help Range Technology construct a cost-effective, cloud-based data center with the flexibility to meet changes in customer demand.”

Nongfu Spring has seven production bases and dozens of factories. Achieving real-time visibility into data was critical for the company to grow, improve efficiency and reduce costs. Freight calculation that previously took 24 hours to execute can now be completed in as little as 27 seconds.

“SAP HANA is a comprehensive and sophisticated in-memory database platform that outperformed on our existing data mart solution based on Oracle,” said Patrick Hoo, CIO, Nongfu Spring. “We were able to replace our data mart based on Oracle 11g database with SAP HANA and achieved three goals: fast data display, highly efficient business logic operations and real-time data synchronization. For example, we found that the same script in the SAP HANA studio was returning results 200 to 300 times faster than the same script in PL/SQL in Oracle, and this query performance improvement was consistent across our 150 reports. We are seeing smooth operations, accurate data and fast performance in our production environment.”

“We continue to see strong interest from customers in adopting SAP HANA and transforming their companies into real-time businesses,” said Dr. Christoph Kollatz, executive vice president, SAP HANA, SAP AG. “The results achieved by Nongfu Spring are just one great example of the potential the SAP HANA platform offers our customers. Now with the launch of the Experience SAP HANA community, everyone can engage with the platform and connect with others in the community to learn firsthand what it can do for their organization.”

IBM is working with the China National Bureau of Statistics, Guizhou Provincial Health Department and Guizhou Mobile to help each build more advanced IT environments based on IBM’s optimized system architecture, data and analytics integration and cloud computing capabilities.

Additionally, IBM announced it has been selected by Yi Lian Zhong Information Technology to build a cloud computing platform improving the lives of Chinese citizens through an online portal of social services. YLZ will expand its existing services through system z to seven more Chinese provinces allowing them to construct a citizen livelihood service information network.

This new cloud platform will connect various networks of urban and rural residents, government departments, social service providers, medical institutions, corporate and public organizations and vocational schools. The project is aimed to help meet the government’s 12th five-year-plan focused on developing programs to improve the citizen’s overall well-being.

New kiosks will be installed across selected communities at civic centers, hospitals, banks, and shopping malls. Participants will be able to swipe their social insurance identity cards to access the additional services offered by various government departments. They can also use their ID cards to settle service payments. YLZ and IBM will integrate the data and business application through the cloud of all participating organizations, allowing the residents in the rural areas to access the same services as residents in cities.

The release of this report coincided with reports that the Chinese military may have acknowledged enabling cyber attacks in a documentary broadcast on state television. An official broadcast on China Central Television included six seconds of footage showing custom built Chinese software.

The report indicates that in 2010, numerous computer systems around the world were the target of intrusions, some of which appear to have originated in China. Cyberwarfare could serve China in data collection through exfiltration, slow response time by targeting network based logistics and communication.

The Chinese Communist Party has consistently denied that it is involved in cyber-attacks, but experts have long suspected that the Chinese military engages in them. While nothing has been proven, the possibility is suspect and under scrutiny.

The DoD’s report also indicates that China has increased diplomatic engagement in forums where cyber issues are discussed. However, they do not yet see eye-to-eye with the U.S. that existing mechanisms such as the Law of Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law apply in cyberspace. 

SK Communications discovered earlier this week that malicious code was used to hack its sites, the Nate portal, the third most visited search engine and email platform in the country and Cyworld, described as Korea’s equivalent to Facebook. Officials explained that hackers infiltrated sites and stole the phone numbers, email addresses, names and encrypted information of up to 35 million users.

They claim to have traced the source of the incursion back to computer IP addresses based in China. 

According to Reuters, accusations against China over hacking incidents have mounted in recent months, with allegations it intruded into the networks of Lockheed Martin and other U.S. military contractors and tried to gain access to the Google email accounts of U.S. officials and Chinese human rights advocates.

This recent attack on Korea’s popular sites follows a series of recent cyber attacks directed at South Korea’s government and financial firms.

According to Bloomberg, computer specialists spent several weeks piecing together information about the attack and recently completed an inventory of stolen documents, which is titled “operational impact assessment.” The results have not been made public.

Through examination of the attack methods and the electronic trail that was left behind, investigators determined the evidence strongly points to China.

“There are some very big questions about the role that China wants to play in the global economic system and what role it can play given some of its behavior,” C. Fred Bergsten, head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Bloomberg.

IMF‘s systems were breached in early June and resulted in the loss of a large amount of data. A senior official for IMF said the cyber attack had occurred over several months and deemed it a “very major breach.”

Image: Peter Hires Images

A strong demand for technology has helped push the United States to lead the industry globally, taking first place from third just a year ago, according to a new survey.

Although the senior technology executives polled in KPMG LLP‘s annual Technology Industry Business Climate survey said they perceive the U.S. market driving revenue growth, they feel less optimism about hiring and expectations of mergers and acquisitions.

Respondents said they expect the U.S. market to have the highest percentage of revenue growth and employment growth over the next 12 months. China, Brazil and India follow the U.S. in revenue, while India and China placed second and third in employment.

In the survey, the U.S. market ranked third in expected revenue growth and fourth in employment growth. In addition, tech leaders this year predict the U.S. also will have the industry’s greatest percentage of research and development investment growth, followed by India and China.

In terms of revenue, 77 percent of the respondents expect the overall revenue at their companies to be higher a year from now. Technology executives said their biggest revenue driver over the next three years will be cloud computing, with 65 percent ranking it as the top driver. The second and third ranked revenue drivers in this year’s survey were mobile applications and advanced data analytics.

Image: mylefthand

China must enhance its cyberwarfare capabilities to counter a Pentagon push, the country’s top military newspaper said yesterday, following allegations that Beijing may be behind a series of cyber attacks on Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors, Reuters reports.

Countering the accusations against China, a report published in the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army said it was Beijing that was vulnerable to attack and that the U.S. military is “hastening to seize the commanding military heights on the Internet.”

“Their actions remind us that to protect the nation’s Internet security, we must accelerate Internet defense development and accelerate steps to make a strong Internet army,” concluded the report surveying the Pentagon’s efforts in cybersecurity.

Although not an official government statement, the report shows how China has shifted its attention to the issues of cyber attacks and defense, Reuters said.

“Although our country has developed into an Internet great power, our Internet security defenses are still very weak,” the report noted. “So we must accelerate development of Internet battle technology and armament. Comprehensively improve our military’s ability to defend the Internet frontiers.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States was notified Wednesday about the compromise and is looking into the allegations, which Clinton called “very serious,” Bloomberg reported.