Hacking smears deflect from real perpetrator: China Daily editorial

An important reason why some Western countries have developed a predilection for hyping up alleged hacking by China when they want to peddle their China threat cliche is that the charges can simply be based on the conjecture of anonymous sources. It's also because of the fact that the potential effects of cybersecurity breaches plays on people's fears that their personal information will fall into the wrong hands.

In the latest example of such mud-slinging, there were UK media reports last week, citing "insiders" familiar with the matter, saying Chinese hackers accessed the internal systems of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom in 2021. Although it claims that no classified or highly sensitive material was breached, the UK government kept the incident secret from the public as it was "very embarrassing".

As Washington has intensified its smear campaign against China, such baseless allegations of Chinese cyberattacks have become more frequent.

For instance, earlier this month, anonymous US and Japanese sources told the US media that Chinese military hackers broke into the Japanese Defense Ministry's most sensitive computer systems in 2020, a claim that the Japanese government denied.

And in July, almost as soon as Microsoft published a report alleging China was spying on the e-mail accounts of some entities, the US State Department and Commerce Department said they were victims of that. The US National Security Agency, the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and their counterparts in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom published a joint advisory sharing technical details on "the recently discovered cluster of activity".

Although it was apparently a well-planned and organized campaign targeting China, the Microsoft report, the very root of the farce, offered no evidence to back its charges.

It is ridiculous that the US, on the one hand, engages in malicious cyber activities against any country around the world, including the UK and its other allies, while on the other hand, it and its allies repeatedly hype up cyber threats from the non-US club. For instance, in Microsoft's taxonomy, which is also endorsed by the US government, the company gives the hackings it discovers family names — Typhoon, Blizzard, Sleet and Sandstorm for Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang and Teheran — along with modifiers according to what it thinks are their purposes and degrees.

This is a typical double standard and political manipulation that aims to give a dog a bad name and then hang it. The US is the initiator of cyber warfare, the largest proliferator of advanced cyber weapons, and the world's largest cyber stealer and eavesdropper. In the eyes of the US, there are no real allies, only its own hegemonic self-interest. That makes the US a complete hypocrite when it comes to maintaining global cybersecurity.