Hacking Blame Games Don’t Work – Will Anything?

Emilio Iasiello

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This is something that prominent cyber thinker James Lewis acknowledged in the article, saying, “You know it’s them, and they know you’re not going to do anything, so it really doesn’t have any effect.” And while this revelation is bearing out to be the case, it begs the question if it was any real tool that states could be used to affect change. Critics of this line of thought are quick to point out how the September 2015 summit between then President Obama and Xi Jinping at least temporarily achieved that very objective. That agreement between the two governments stipulated that neither would engage in economic cyber espionage with the intent of providing competitive advantages to their respective companies or commercial sectors. This was largely viewed as a huge accomplishment, given at this point, China was already largely perceived as the leading pervasive cyber threat to steal sensitive information and intellectual property. China even signedsimilar deals in November 2015 with G20 nations, suggesting a positive change was occurring.

For a brief period, direct, diplomatic confrontation seemed to be a watershed moment. Indeed, one U.S. cybersecurity vendor claimed that China-linked cyber activity decreased between September 2015 and June 2016, not only against the United States but other foreign countries, per the vendor’s findings. But any gains were short lived as China quickly resumed the volume and scope of its proficient cyber espionage, finding immense return in the information it stole, as well as gaining footholds into high-value networks for further exploitation or other objectives. A different U.S. cybersecurity vendor maintained that China was still conducting cyber espionage even after the Obama-Xi summit. Despite the international publicity created by government accusations of Chinese cyber espionage, and private sector vendor reports echoing U.S. government intelligence language attributing cyber activity to China, and the United States charging Chinese military state actors with hacking, none had achieved the goal of deterrence.