CHINA has denied a report that its military had successfully hacked into the Pentagon's computer network in June forcing the shutdown of a part of the computer service for a week.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Jiang Yu, dismissed accusations by current and former US officials as reported in London's Financial Times yesterday that the incursion was traced with "very high level of confidence … trending towards total certainty" to the People's Liberation Army.
Ms Jiang said the accusations were "groundless" and a demonstration of an old cold war mentality. Repeating comments she made after the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, raised similar concerns about the infiltration of German government systems with the Premier, Wen Jiabao, in Beijing, Ms Jiang said China opposed hacking and was frequently itself a victim of cyber attacks.
"The Chinese Government has consistently opposed and vigorously attacked according to the law all internet-wrecking crimes, including hacking," she said. Beijing has devoted much of its defence budget to developing more advanced technology, including computer capabilities.
The US President, George Bush, is scheduled to meet the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, in Sydney while the two leaders are here for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.
The Financial Times reported that the Pentagon was investigating what data had been taken, and a source told the paper that most of it was probably unclassified.
While the Pentagon declined to say who was behind the hacking, which led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, officials said it was China's People's Liberation Army.
"The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system, and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale," a former official told the paper. The official also said the PLA had penetrated the networks of US defence companies and think-tanks. It said hackers from various locations in China had spent several months trying to tap into the system before breaching its cyber defences, forcing the Pentagon to shut down its network for more than a week. Both the US and Chinese militaries were widely assumed to conduct computer espionage on each other, "But US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times," the Financial Times reported.
Dr Merkel raised her concerns about reports of China hacking into German government systems with Mr Wen on a trip to China last week.
The German weekly Der Spiegel reported that espionage programs traced to the PLA had been detected in computer systems at Dr Merkel's office, the foreign ministry and other government agencies in Berlin.
Senior German officials told the newspaper that the hacking operation was discovered in May, and that computers in the Chancellery, the foreign, economics and research ministries had been targeted.
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