Inside Cybersecurity

March 29, 2024

Daily News

DOD report: Cyber spies in East Asia and Pacific slowed down, got better

By Christopher J Castelli / August 14, 2015

Countries in East Asia and the Pacific used cyber espionage to target sensitive or classified U.S. technologies less often last year but got better at picking the most valuable systems to hack, according to a new Pentagon report.

Reported attempts by foreign governments worldwide to gain unauthorized access to these technologies through cyber espionage and other means continued to increase in fiscal 2014 compared to the previous year, but at a reduced pace, according to the Defense Security Service's latest annual assessment of such threats. Espionage reports were up 8 percent, the report states.

Of all the world’s regions, East Asia and the Pacific remained the top collector of these U.S. technologies but the number of espionage reports attributed to it decreased 6 percent from fiscal 2013, the report states.

“The diminished proportion of reports attributed to East Asia and the Pacific entities was primarily the result of a decrease in reports associated with suspicious network activity,” the report states. The U.S. government and industry’s efforts to publicize the collection operations of hackers in that particular region and to catalog the infrastructure and tactics used by the hackers led to the decrease, the agency writes.

“Conversely,” the report adds, “[Defense Security Service] analysis disclosed East Asia and the Pacific countries possibly used this slow down to refine and hone collection actions as the information identified in these attacks appeared to be of greater value.”

The unclassified report refrains from discussing hacking operations tied to particular countries. But U.S. officials have repeatedly vocalized concerns about China’s use of cyber spying to steal U.S. technologies. China is continuing to use its cyber espionage capabilities to gather intelligence on the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs, the Defense Department wrote in its latest annual report on China’s military, issued in May.

Top Obama administration officials repeatedly underscored concerns about China’s activities in cyberspace during bilateral talks with Chinese leaders this summer. In addition, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said China was the “leading suspect” behind the massive hacking of the Office of Personnel Management's information systems.

In fiscal 2014, spear phishing remained a common cyber activity used by East Asia and the Pacific actors to gain initial access to networks, the agency writes. “Other activities included website exploitation, compromised credentials, network scanning, brute-force attacks, and distributed denial of service,” the report adds.

The report predicts hackers in East Asia and the Pacific region as well as the Near East will continue to use cyber espionage, including current tools and new methods, to target sensitive and classified U.S. technologies. – Christopher J. Castelli (ccastelli@iwpnews.com)