China, Cyber Control and Attacks

China official tells Web firms to control content JOE McDONALD
BEIJING— The Associated Press
Published Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2011 9:19AM EDT
A Communist Party leader has told China's Internet companies to tighten control over material online as Beijing cracks down on dissent and tries to block the rise of Middle East-style protests.
The party secretary for Beijing, Liu Qi, issued the warning following a visit this week to Sina Corp., which operates a popular microblogging site, according to the party-published newspaper Beijing Daily.
Internet companies should “strengthen management and firmly prevent the spread of fake and harmful information,” Liu was quoted as saying after the visit Monday to Sina. He said companies should “resist fake and negative information.”
Communist authorities encourage Internet use for education and business but are uneasy about its potential to spread dissent, especially after social networking and other websites played a key role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.
Beijing is in the midst of one of its most sweeping crackdowns on dissent in years and has detained or questioned hundreds of activists, lawyers and others.
Click here to read more: China Throttles Dissent

Afghanistan Imbroglio and the Chinese Windfall Dream
Guest Column by Dr Sheo Nandan Pandey and Prof Hem Kusum
China’s print media has been typically agog with opinions on imperatives for China once the US troops withdraw from Afghanistan. It included both agency reports and scholarly papers.  The Chinese bloggers have literally had field day. This got into motion soon after  US President Barack Obama unveiled troop withdrawal plan on June 22, 2011.The pace and quantum of the outpour suggest the stoked up glee of the Chinese nation.
Chinese attitudes toward the troop withdrawal will be examined at two levels of analysis. The first is a conventional, international political view. It draws upon the work of international relations theorists such as Hans Morgenthau, who argued that power, prestige, and national might are the currency of international relations and that national security is a principal concern of governments.
This analysis treats China as a risen global power that has but to behave much like any other global power. The Chinese political elites thus, try to manipulate the international environment through the judicious use of political, economic, and military resources to best serve China’s national interests at minimum risks and costs in tune with a dream of their kind. By assuming that the nature of interests and concerns is fairly uniform among nations, the paper draws conclusion about China’s likely attitudes in general terms.
Read more: Afghanistan Imbroglio and the Chinese Windfall

PMO faces largest strategically targeted cyber attack
Published: Sunday, Aug 21, 2011, 11:00 IST
On July 12, some of the top officials in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), including principal secretary to the PM TKA Nair and national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, received a flurry of calls from the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), India’s technical intelligence agency.
The calls were brief and to the point. All systems were to be shut down and all computers were to be unplugged until NTRO officials arrived at the PMO. As an NTRO team set off from their headquarters in the outskirts of Delhi, other key ministries were also asked to shut down.
This was perhaps the most strategically targeted cyber attack on India’s key ministries, as officials from the ministries of home affairs, defence, external affairs and the armed forces began to receive similar calls asking them to shut down systems.
It started in the early hours of July 12 when NTRO officials monitoring India’s critical systems infrastructure began to notice a mass of emails from one address with an attached Word document titled “cms,ntro:dailyelec.mediareport (2011)” being sent to inboxes of key officials of India’s vast security architecture.
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