The Taiwanese government faces Five Million cyberattacks per day. Nearly half of them are believed to be originated from China.
Cyber security department director Chien Hung-Wei told parliament representatives on Wednesday that government infrastructure faces “five million attacks and scans a day”. Security experts are working tirelessly to strengthen defensive measures and collect relevant data for examination in a bid to stop the assaults.
Taiwan’s defence ministry warns of an increase in the attacks carried by China-linked actors against its systems. The ministry accused China of ramping up since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who always claimed the independence of the island from Beijing. On the other end, Beijing considers the island as part of its own territory and does not exclude its military occupation in the future.
According to the report shared by Taiwan’s defence ministry, the ministry of information security and protection centre handled around 1.4 billion “anomalies” from 2019 to August 2021 to prevent potential hacking. Last year in August 2020, Chinese attackers secured access to around 6,000 email accounts belonging to at least 10 Taiwan government agencies.
Since 2018, the China-linked cyber espionage groups tracked as Blacktech and Taidoor have been targeting government agencies and information service providers. All these cyber assaults are part of a cyber espionage campaign, Taiwan Bureau Cyber Security Investigation Office reported.
The Chinese government has increased diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan over the years, it also showed the muscles increasing military drills near the country in recent weeks.
Many defence experts believe that the Chinese cyber warfare department is at least a decade ahead in terms of cyber capabilities and is aiming towards the goal of instantly disrupting or at least weakening the enemy’s computer networks so as to paralyze their decision-making capability at the very commencement of hostilities.
According to a paper titled China’s Cyber Warfare Capability and India’s Concerns, published in the Journal of Defence Studies, the author revealed that Chinese government is training its military personnel in Information Warfare. In 2013, a security firm Mandiant published a detailed report attributing a Chinese Military Unit to cyber espionage. This was perhaps the first time that such technical evidence and analysis linking activities to a government entity had been made public.
