Gadgetory

hey everyone and welcome to the inside scoop I'm car tsuboi and i'm joined by cnet chief political correspondent Declan McCullough thanks for joining us Declan and today we are talking about a new report coming out about over 140 companies that have supposedly been attacked by someone within China why don't you clarify a little bit well what we knew going in and this has been the case for years now Google was the first major company to go public with this about three years ago we knew that they're a bunch of hackers in China probably around Shanghai who were responsible for a lot of these intrusions but what we didn't know was whether they're part of the Chinese government or military and the report that was released a day or so ago provides pretty compelling evidence I mean if this were a jury the jury would have voted to convict that it's not not just a group of hackers that are working independently this is actually a part of the Chinese army and they're the ones who are behind oh these hundred plus intrusions into largely US companies and how are they doing this how are they getting in well it's a combination of sort of low skill and high skill attacks what what they often do is they'll send you email that purports to be from your boss your manager your CEO saying here's a new presentation here's a new press release can you double click this and let me know what you think well that sounds pretty compelling especially if it's it comes from a gmail address you don't you may not know what your boss is home gmail addresses if it looks compelling you're probably just going to click on it and then they get access to your system from that that an entry point or access point that they can then leap frog into other systems I'm map out the internal network i infect other computers and it's very difficult to protect against these it spits they're called spearfishing it's very targeted attacks against individuals I mean if you get email from your mom or your cousin you might actually open it absolutely we know that more than 20 different industries have been attached what do you think the purpose is what kind of information are they collecting oh we've known for a while that these industries being attacked I mean there was a flurry of articles last summer saying that say the electric power grid has been infiltrated just kind of scary I really fail to understand why any nuclear power point house we connected to the internet but putting that aside there's the interesting thing is that if you have control of some of these computers I mean you can do malicious things you can destroy data you can alter data which is almost worse or you can try to take over some of the control systems that might control say water utilities or sewage utilities or or so on but they have it it's almost like they had order from above or is it a code of ethics I don't know but all they're doing is extracting data it's espionage it's not sabotage what is the position the US government is taking on this the US government has been I mean look the US government is not entirely stupid they they do know this is going on they've have it we've we've known since a year or so that the Air Force has a special office that has been looking into this on the government end but I mean that this is this is it's not attacking us systems to destroy them it's not really war in the traditional sense it's espionage and espionage is typically handled not by you know invading other countries but by diplomatic action so yesterday at the State Department the spokesman said well we're talking with its at the highest levels on what what this means i don't know there's a White House report due to come out today talking about espionage and theft of trade secrets China is probably the biggest culprit in this respect and so I think this is something that's going to be handled at the diplomatic level and probably not just in the next year but over the next five or ten years I would think so as well both both parties are going to keep continuing doing what they're doing and will to see what the response is exactly great thank you so much Declan McCullough I'm Cara tsuboi thanks for watching the inside scoop