Di Bai Zhi, and a former high-ranking official in the Chinese state media.
They said in an interview that Chinese officials were “intoxicated” over the alleged cyber incident – a claim that was dismissed by Chinese officials themselves when I asked about such allegations.
I also spoke to one of the researchers who is leading research on the attack on the PLA general staff. This person said: “I think [the PLA general staff] had suffered an attack, and they needed to know about it.”
The PLA general staff – the top general officers and their staffs – is the Chinese military force responsible for managing the Chinese military’s many internal divisions – an operation that is meant to ensure each division operates in a way that suits the needs of China’s political leaders, generals and bureaucrats.
The division known as the General Staff, for its size, is the Chinese military’s most sensitive operation. The division was responsible for maintaining political stability, protecting military positions and national secrets, and also maintaining the PLA’s large network of military bases.
Since last autumn, when the cyber attacks first started happening, the PLA general staff has also been the target of more hacking attempts, including one that targeted all its computer systems at once. The hacker was reportedly arrested, but the PLA said it would be unable to confirm whether the hacks were linked.
“I think there’s some truth to those claims that the Chinese have come out pretty angry”, says Michael Ellis, a cybersecurity expert who sits on the board of advisers to the US-based American Academy of Technological Sciences. “But we don’t know why. Our intelligence community – or rather our intelligence agencies – are not doing their job, which is to give the military answers about the things that they are doing.”
The most obvious explanation that Chinese officials could use is that the Chinese hackers were trying to expose corruption within the elite.
“There is speculation that a lot of the hacking was in an attempt to embarrass the general staff,” says Steve Tsang of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank. In 2007, for example, a group calling itself Anonymous took credit for damaging military websites, and even tried to breach the PLA’s main e-mail system. China is believed to have a hard-line policy of not allowing Anonymous or other outside influences to influence the PLA.
“That’s one of the reasons people see some hope. It’s the government’s job to