Chinese People's Liberation Army Unit 61398 - The Shadow of the New Cold War in Cyberspace

Chinese People's Liberation Army Unit 61398 - The Shadow of the New Cold War in Cyberspace

In February 2013, a report released by the US cybersecurity firm Mandiant shocked the international community by pointing out that the Chinese People's Liberation Army's Unit 61398 is a major cyber attack base against the United States. Hundreds of personnel operated from a base in Shanghai, targeting military secrets and corporate intellectual property, and repeatedly penetrating a wide range of fields, including aerospace, defense, communications, and energy. Among other things, the possible theft of blueprints for the F35 fighter jet was seen as a serious blow to the U.S. defense industry and an acceleration of China's military technology development. At the time, China was rushing to transform itself "from a manufacturing industry to a technological superpower" against a backdrop of rapid economic growth, and state-sponsored cyber theft was seen as a shortcut to this transformation. This was a move that was also directly related to the "China Manufacturing 2025" that the
Xi Jinping administration would later set forth. The U.S., for the first time, officially named China, and took steps to strengthen its diplomatic protests and defense policy, but the confrontation between the two countries became even more acute. This incident marked the beginning of the new Cold War, in which Cold War-style espionage activities were shifted to cyberspace, and it served as an opportunity to shake up the international order while blurring the boundaries between industrial espionage and national security.