Shadow of the Knowledge Robbers - Chinese Cyber Attacks 2010."

Shadow of the Knowledge Robbers - Chinese Cyber Attacks 2010."

In 2010, the Chinese government launched a massive cyber attack against U.S. companies. This was later dubbed "Operation Aurora," and targets ranged from Google and Adobe to defense industries, financial institutions, and news organizations. The purpose of the attack was to steal intellectual property and internal information, and it shocked the world because it was strongly suspected that a state was systematically involved, rather than the traditional crimes committed by individuals or small groups. At the time, China was experiencing rapid economic growth and had made high-tech industries a pillar of its national strategy, absorbing technologies from foreign companies while strengthening its own industries. The United States, on the other hand, was in the process of recovering from the financial crisis, and maintaining its technological superiority was the key to rebuilding its economy, so the attack became a microcosm of the struggle for supremacy between the two countrie
s. The attack exploited a zero-day vulnerability, and the intrusion was confirmed to have taken advantage of a flaw in Internet Explorer. It was a classic example of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), which is difficult to defend against with conventional firewalls and anti-virus and combines with spear phishing to lurk for long periods of time. The incident prompted the U.S. to establish a Cyber Command, and companies began to adopt new defenses, such as Zero Trust. Operation Aurora demonstrated that cyberspace would become a battleground for economic and technological hegemony, an event that heralded the dawn of the cyberwar era.