Google’s decision to publicly confront the Chinese government over cyber attacks that have been hitting Google customers for the past year or so poses a difficult challenge for the Obama administration. The threat by Google to shut down its operations in China over the attacks is the first public acknowledgement by a major US corporation of the attacks which the US intelligence community has known about for almost a decade.
The facts are that China has been waging a cyber war against the US government and companies that involve literally millions of attacks each day. Every major US corporation operating in China has been targeted, as have universities, research laboratories and other American companies that have intellectual property worth stealing. The US estimates that $50 billion in corporate secrets are stolen each year and that unknown quantities of government and national security networks have been penetrated.
US intelligence has set up the largest counter cyber espionage effort in American history – codenamed Byzantine Foothold and Byzantine Hades – to try to counter the attacks, so far without success.
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