NASA and Houston Oil Companies Attacked by Cyber Spies

“A long term, persistent campaign to collect sensitive but unclassified information from U.S. Government and U.S. defense industry networks using computer network exploitation techniques, long attributed to China, has successfully exfiltrated at least 10 to 20 terabytes of data from US Government networks as of 2007, according to US Air Force estimates, and that figure has possibly grown in the past two years, though no figure is publicly available.”

- Page 7, Executive Summary, “Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation,” prepared for The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission by Bryan Krekel, Northrop Grumman Corp., October 2009.
Website and PDF below.

March 25, 2010  Houston, Texas - The first week of March, I was in Houston, Texas, to attend the NASA Lunar and Planetary Institute conference. To my surprise, one subject that kept coming up in conversations and in the Houston media is persistent attacks by cyber spies - especially from China.