The Internet War

In the Shandong province of China, the Lanxiang Vocational School offers courses in subjects as varied as automotive mechanics, cooking and computer science.

This educational institution became a hot topic, not just in China, but in the entire world, when The New York Times reported a few days ago that Lanxiang and a Shanghai university are where the cyber-attacks on computer networks of Chinese human rights activists, as well as companies like Google and Intel, originated this January.

The school and the Chinese government have denied participation in the aforementioned attacks that, along with Obama’s recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, are the most recent source of tension in the ever complex relations between the United States and China. China’s advent as a potent economic force comes accompanying an immense military power, which is spreading to a new battlefield: the Internet. According to computer security experts cited by the international press, the Chinese strategy has two pillars.

The first is to prevent the web from contaminating the politics, culture and values that the state hegemony supports. Chinese authorities are constructing a sort of “Berlin Wall” around the web, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently described it. Second, they are recruiting a sophisticated army of geniuses with the capability to systematically, and with greater and greater scope, attack “enemy” networks.

Remember in 2008, just days before the armed conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia, the internet infrastructure of Georgia was subject to a cyber-attack that they claimed originated from Russian locations.

The Internet war is not a subject from science fiction. The risk of suffering cyber-attacks of a grand scale — with low implementation costs, but deadly social and economic consequences — originating as much from internal as external enemies, is a threat that very few countries in the world are prepared to face.