Cyber Operations

6Chinese Cyber Operations

6.1 Chinese Cyber Operations

China probably currently represents the broadest, most active, and persistent cyber espionage threat to U.S. Government and private‐sector networks. China’s cyber pursuits and its industry’s export of related technologies increase the threats of aggressive cyber operations against the U.S. homeland, suppression of the free flow of information in cyberspace – such as U.S. web content – that Beijing views as threatening to the CCP’s hold on power, and the expansion of technology‐driven authoritarianism globally.

(Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), 2023)

Similar to Russia, Chinese clandestine services have used cyber as a means of spying since the beginning of networked computers. For example, Operation Tiger Trap (Wise, 2011) and Operation Parlor Maid (Campbell, 2003) included Chinese intelligence penetrations at U.S. National Laboratories and the FBI, respectively. In addition, cyber was used as a means to complement these essentially human intelligence operations (Trulock, 2004).

Chinese cyberspace operations began with patriotic hacktivists during the late 1990s, performing online protests of the persecution of ethnic Chinese during riots in Indonesia (1998) (Henderson, 2007). This was followed a few years later by hacktivist operations that included defacing a U.S. White House web page in order to protest a Chinese fighter aircraft’s crashing, after it ran into a U.S. surveillance airplane in the ...