PRISM Whistle-Blower: US Has Been Hacking China For Years

Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who released details on the US’ controversial PRISM data collection tool, has claimed the US has been hacking China for years.

Snowden said public officials and businesses in China had been targeted, claiming there had been more than 61,000 hacking operations carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA). Hundreds of targets were based in China and Hong Kong, he told the South China Morning Post.

US hacking China

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he told the paper.

It had been assumed the American government sponsored cyber attacks on Chinese entities, as well as the reverse, but there is no proof. China, in response to allegations it has carried out large-scale cyber operations on US government and private industry, has continued to deny everything.

Yet evidence produced by US companies has often named China as the perpetrator of advanced cyber attacks.

A report from security supplier Mandiant recently claimed well over 100 US organisations had been targeted by a group with apparent connections to the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army.

Verizon, the same company that was caught up in the recent leaks and found to be supplying all of its customers’ communications data on to the NSA, claimed in April that China was behind 96 percent of cyber espionage campaigns it had seen over the last year. One in five of those attacks had ties to the Chinese government, according to Verizon.

Meanwhile, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said he is happy that GCHQ is not breaking the law in accessing communications data, having spoken with foreign secretary William Hague and home secretary Theresa May on Prism.

It was claimed GCHQ had access to the PRISM data, which, it was claimed, was taken directly from servers of Internet giants including Google and Microsoft, although there remains much ambiguity about what PRISM is and what data it processes.

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