Even though the Beijing government denies if the unit’s
involved in current cyber attacks and often finger-point to Edward Snowden and
the NSA, nonetheless is the Unit 61398 Mainland China’s “cyber warfare center
of operations?”
By: Ringo Bones
The Uyghur and Tibetan Diaspora – or anyone labeled by the
Beijing government as a “terrorist group” – seems to agree that Edward
Snowden’s cyber-shenanigans pointing the United States’ National Security
Agency resources is eavesdropping on everyone’s online data transactions is a
lesser evil compared to the “Beijing 50-Cent Cyber Army” and other
“Cyber-Terrorist” organizations actively sponsored by the Beijing government is
that the NSA will probably never wreck your microfinance business’ database
with malware. Back in February 3, 2013, Google chairman Eric Schmidt calls the
People’s Republic of China an “internet menace” due to the Beijing government’s
act of actively supporting home-grown top-notch cyber-criminals in order to
achieve its own political and economic ends. Though the free world’s wariness
of the Beijing sponsored cyber attacks had since been noted way before the
September 11, 2001 terror attacks, no one on this side of the “Great Firewall
of China” has any idea what a top-notch Beijing government sponsored cyber
warfare center looks like until February 20, 2013 when it was divulged that a
certain non-descript government building in Shanghai was the nerve center of
the Beijing government’s “Cyber Warfare Corps”.
The cyber attack culprit was then traced to the Unit 61398
of the Mainland Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Look-wise, it is a
non-descript looking 12-storey government building in an army base in the
middle of Shanghai that is surrounded by a local run-down neighborhood that for
a number of years now had launched cyber attacks on American I.T. companies
with ongoing US government contracts. Western cyber security analysts still
only had speculations on the structural hierarchy of the Beijing government’s
“cyber warfare corps” – whether they employ civilian cyber criminals / cyber
terrorists / hackers or it is mostly manned by People’s Liberation Army
personnel with advanced computer skills; Though the “Comment Crew” and “Shanghai
Group” had been speculated to consist mostly of the Mainland Chinese People’s
Liberation Army’s elite crew of master cyber warriors.
For a number of years now, the Obama administration had been
wary of the Beijing government’s carte blanche attitude of its homegrown cyber
terrorists / cyber criminals as long as these online outlaws work in
maintaining Beijing’s interests. And unlike the secret eavesdropping activities
since divulged by disenfranchised NSA private intelligence contractor Edward
Snowden, the cyber-shenanigans done in the name of the Beijing government
doesn’t just involve mere unauthorized looking into everyone’s private data but
more often than not involve launching Directed Denial of Service or DDOS
attacks on groups the Beijing government perceives as their “enemy” – i.e. the
online computer infrastructures of Tibetan and Uyghur Diaspora living in the
United States and elsewhere.
