May 15,2008:
Belgium is the latest country to
alert its citizens of Cyber War attacks (or just criminal hacking attacks)
coming out of China, and into Belgium. The most worrisome aspect of this are
the targeted attacks against specific Belgian government officials, and key members of NATO and European Union (EU) in
Brussels. The latter two organizations have their headquarters in Belgium. It
was noted that some of these targeted attacks were further specialized in that
they were looking for data on Belgian energy (usually oil) related projects in
Africa. This sort of thing leaves investigators believing that the ultimate
consumer of such information is the Chinese government. It's also possible that
these are criminals stealing specific data for specific customers. That makes
little difference to the victims, but is of interest to those trying to improve
Internet security. You don't go after criminal hackers the same way to do a
national Cyber War operation.