The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials.

The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.

Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.

One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

Remember the unrestricted warfare meme? It got a ton of discussion offline...

The Pentagon is still investigating how much data was downloaded, but one person with knowledge of the attack said most of the information was probably “unclassified”. He said the event had forced officials to reconsider the kind of information they send over unsecured e-mail systems.

Um.. Thanks for the help with that?

To underscore the threat, he notes that no cyber red team – hackers enlisted to attack systems to help identify weaknesses – has ever failed to meet its objective.

To underscore the larger context of the threat, I should note that no elite US military unit - soldiers enlisted to look at ways to make shit go "boom" - has ever failed to come up with all kinds of ways to make shit go "boom".

Cyberspace is Spook Country these days... I imagine this is an interesting time to work in counter-intelligence. May ye' live in interesting times..

Indeed, such are the Beijing government’s efforts to control the activities of its citizens on the internet that any hackers operating from China are almost certainly working for the authorities. Yet it is probably also right to assume that the US and other western governments are busy infiltrating the computer systems of foreign governments. It is therefore disingenuous to complain too vigorously when those same foreign governments become good at doing it back.

The attractions of using cyberspace for spying are obvious. It is cheap and governments do not have to deal with the risks and insecurities associated with intelligence officers, agents and informers operating in foreign countries.

At least the weird looking guy in charge of the kingdom of failure only seems to have nukes and missiles and bullshit..

Lieutenant General Robert Elder, senior Air Force officer for cyberspace issues, recently joked that North Korea “must only have one laptop” to make the more serious point that every potential adversary – except Pyongyang – routinely scans US computer networks.

North Korea may be impotent in cyberspace, but its neighbour is not. The Chinese military sent a shiver down the Pentagon’s spine in June by successfully hacking into an unclassified network used by the top policy advisers to Robert Gates, the defence secretary. (link)