China increasing attempts to recruit American spies

Updated November 23, 2009 13:59:05

China is sharply stepping up espionage against the United States, a report to the U-S Congress says.

The report, by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, details efforts by China to penetrate U-S computer networks to obtain information and warns China is ramping up attempts to recruit Americans as spies.

Presenter: Bo Hill
Speaker: Dr Larry Wortzel, the vice chairman of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission

china, united states, defence and national security

WORTZEL: Well human espionage traditionally they tended to go for ethnic Chinese Americans or people that they identified over a period of time as real sympathisers to China or the Chinese Communist Party. In the past few years the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have identified long-term sleeper agents and other agents that for money recruited Americans working for the Department of Defence. So that's a little change in human espionage. But the real change is cyber espionage, and they have a sophisticated effort that is penetrating government networks and the networks of defence contractors, gathering information and our library of Congress for instance in computer terms holds about 20 to 30 terabytes of data, two or three times the size of library at Congress has been exfiltrated from defence systems.

HILL: What are they doing?

WORTZEL: Well I mean they're leap-frogging their own research and development process, but essentially they're attacking the nodes, they're penetrating by inserting malicious viruses and then it allows their computer programmers and operators to actually take control of a website and download and exfiltrate the data to servers back in China.

HILL: And how does this benefit China and adversely how does it harm the United States?

WORTZEL: Well it gives them a lot of defence information; it gives them information that puts them ahead in the research and development process. It saves their industries money. And we're not alone; I mean Australia experienced an attack back in August when the Australian film festival's website was shut down by some entity in China because Rebiya Kadeer visited, the Uighur activist. Your Prime Minister and his delegation were attacked and hacked into back in August 2008 on a trip to China, and a series of fishing and spam email attacks with malicious code or viruses attached got your Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

HILL: Is it just a short-term inconvenience or are their long term implications?

WORTZEL: Well the long-term implications is once somebody is able to take control of and navigate your website they've probably left malicious code that could be activated at any time to either download more or actually shut down a website.

HILL: And the report says the attacks were likely supported if not controlled by the Chinese government. How was that conclusion reached?

WORTZEL: We actually let out a contract that was for bid to do this research and the Corporation won the contract, and one of the terms of the contract was that we had to have an unclassified report. And they managed to come up with a case study of a major high-technology firm where through a combination of looking at the servers and the types of key strokes and commands, they were able to get this right back to China. And they did some other analysis that identified some parts of the Chinese military that engage in this type of warfare. And quite frankly when you have human espionage controlled by agents of China it's already where they've been to court and the spies have been convicted and jailed, and they're attacking certain defence contractors, and then you have cyber attacks against the same defence contractors for the same types of information. I mean I infer that it's still the Chinese government there.