On Sept. 25, China and the United States of America signed a treaty to refrain from attacking and pilfering company intellectual property or trade secrets for commercial advantage. However, a cyber security services provider, CrowdStrike, accuses hackers from China have targeted seven US companies in the last three weeks.
During the announcement of the agreement, President Obama said that the US would still be 'watching carefully' to see if the treaty has been upheld in both countries. He did not rule out the possibility of economic sanctions against Chinese companies if the attacks persist.
According to CrowdStrike's blog post, even after the signing of the MOA, they continued to leverage their Falcon cloud-based endpoint technology, which is set up across several Fortune 500 companies. This allowed them to monitor activities and notified their clients of any attempted disturbances into their networks.
After three weeks, the Falcon platform had prevented a number of intrusions into the systems of their clients, seven of which are from technology and or pharmaceutical sectors, from hackers allegedly that are affiliated to the Chinese government. The primary benefit of such intrusions is clearly aligned to intellectual property and trade secrets, rather than to conduct traditional national-security related intelligence collection which the Cyber agreement does not prohibit accordingly.
This report from CrowdStrike would most likely affect the two countries' agreement of limiting attacks on private companies. According to NY Times, some number of analysts had already expressed skepticism that the treaty would lead to changes in the policy.
Some of the attacks are said to be done by a group called Deep Panda, which CrowdStrike has been tracking for many years. The group usually goes after national security targets, but it has hacked several agriculture, finance, chemical and technology companies as well.
The White House, on the other hand, told the news service that it is well aware of CrowdStrike's claims - but, it kept silent as to agreeing with them.
What do you think of the surging attacks from Chinese government-related websites? Can this compromise the on-going treaty?
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