Chinese cyber espionage grown exponentially: Congressman

A top US lawmaker has alleged that China's economic cyber espionage has grown exponentially in recent years, both in terms of its volume and the damage it is doing to America's economic future.

Asserting that the United States today faces a significant and ongoing cyber security threat, Congressman Michael Rogers said, "the US faces a significant and ongoing cyber security threat today, one that presents grave issues of national and economic security."

"Sorry to say, China's economic cyber espionage has not diminished since our last hearing. In fact, it has grown exponentially, both in terms of its volume and damage it is doing to our nation's economic future," he alleged.

"The technological leadership and national security of the United States is at risk because some of our most innovative ideas and sensitive information are being brazenly stolen by these cyber-attacks," he added.

Rogers was speaking yesterday while chairing the Congressional hearing "Advanced Cyber Threats Facing Our Nation" of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

"The Chinese intelligence services that conduct these attacks have little to fear because we have no practical deterrence in place today," Rogers said. "China's economic cyber espionage is not only a threat that we face.

American financial institutions have been subjected to an intensifying campaign of distributed denial-of-service attacks on their networks over the last year. While these DDoS tactic isn't new, the scale and speed with which it happened was unprecedented, and made the attacks very difficult to defend against," he said.

Kevin Mandia, CEO, Mandiant, which deals with advanced threat detection and response solutions and services, told lawmakers that majority of the cyber-attacks in the US originate from China. "The vast majority of the attacks we respond to have IP addresses that originate in China...," Mandiant said.

Destructive attacks appear to be coming from the Middle East now. But the landscape has been the first two, the China and Russia threat, for probably the last 10 to 15 years," Mandia said.

John Engler, the former three-term governor of Michigan, currently the president of The Business Roundtable, said that the cyber-security threats are constantly changing.

"Some actors just want to disrupt critical services, while others seek to steal sensitive government and corporate information. Not only does this represent a serious threat to individual privacy, it also seriously endangered our national and economic security," he said.