China blamed for advanced US weapons snoop
Updated
There are reports that someone has been illegally peeking at one of America's most advanced secret projects, and fingers are again being pointed at China.
Spies have reportedly hacked into the Joint Strike Fighter project - the front-line jet fighters that Australia and many other Western powers plan to buy from the United States. The Pentagon is refusing to confirm the breach of cyber security for the F-35, but the Wall Street Journal newspaper says the attack appears to have originated in China.
Presenter: Kim Landers, Washington correspondent
Speaker: Jessica Herrera-Flanagan, cyber security expert; Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Centre For Democracy and Technology
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KIM LANDERS: Australia is expected to buy up to 100 of the Joint Strike Fighters, also known as the F-35s.
Now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that computer spies have hacked into the Pentagon's program for the new fighter jet, and that the intruders were able to copy massive amounts of data.
Jessica Herrera-Flanagan is a cyber security expert.
JESSICA HERRERA-FLANIGAN: What we're seeing are more attacks coming across and we can't tell if they're foreign governments, if they're criminal operations, or if they're some 16-year-old geek in his underwear surrounded by pizza boxes, hacking away in the middle of the night.
We just can't tell, and that's what makes it so scary.
KIM LANDERS: An unnamed former US official says the attack appears to have originated in China, but the Chinese embassy in Washington calls the report "a product of the Cold War mentality".
The computer hackers reportedly exploited weaknesses in the networks of some contractors helping to build the Joint Strike Fighter.
The Pentagon won't confirm the security breach.
But a top US Air Force officer has acknowledged that classified information in the hands of contractors has complicated the task of safeguarding technology for the F-35.
Lieutenant General Robert Elder, the global strike commander at the US Strategic Command, says the F-35's suppliers have to be networked together.
But every time they share information, they run the risk of sharing it with someone they don't want to.
The newspaper says former US officials believe the infiltrations date back as far as 2007, but that the plane's most vital systems, such as flight controls and sensors, are stored on secure computers not connected to the Internet.
Jim Dempsey is the vice-president for public policy at the Centre for Democracy and Technology, a privacy and civil liberties group.
JIM DEMPSEY: You have to worry that if the hackers were able to steal data, to remove data, that you have to worry whether they altered data, and introduced some vulnerabilities - left something behind, as well as taking something.
