Chinese Hackers Steal Top US Weapons Designs

n1ywb writes "Chinese hackers have gained access to the designs of many of the nation's most sensitive advanced weapons systems, according to a report prepared for the Defense Department and government and defense industry officials,The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The compromised weapons designs include, among others, the advanced Patriot missile system, the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense systems, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter." Also (with some more details and news-report round-up) at SlashBI.

Okay, who's the moron?

[patchouly]

What moron thought to himself that having sensitive blue prints to highly classified military equipment was best stored on a computer with Internet access?

Re: Internet connection

[O('_')O_Bush]

It wasn't otherwise the whole internet would have become classified. The Chinese stole it off one of the classified networks (like SIPRNet), which the DoD has known to be compromised for quite some time. Because of this, really sensitive things aren't kept on it, only mildly sensitive things. If the article implies more, it is sensationalism.

False Flag

[Anonymous Coward]

How else will they get all new warships and a new state of the art cyber terrorist unit?

Design != manufacture capability

[intermodal]

China can steal all the designs they want, but without successfully implementing the designs, I'm honestly not that concerned. In the 1970s, China managed to kludge together a weak clone of Boeing's 20+-year-old 707, powered by what are believed to have been spare 707 engines. If you think China can manage to cobble together some F-35s that will be worth the effort, or some F/A-18s that can match US spec, you need to understand that it's easier and probably more cost-effective to place orders with Sukhoi Design Bureau for something that actually works than it is to duplicate the processes needed to actually create the American aircraft mentioned above.

China doesn't have the best track record in building designs stolen aerospace designs from other countries, and has found better success in getting people to willingly hand them the capabilities and processes. China's MD-80 license production and the assistance they got from McDonnell-Douglas is the biggest factor in their current aerospace pushes being at least semi-feasible.

Re:Internet connection

[cold fjord]

Why is information like this on computers that are connected to the internet?

So that it can be leaked, justifying the costly production of a whole new generation of warmachines.

Because it isn't like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or various other countries would want to upgrade their military independently of the US, for their own purposes. None of their weapons designers ever had an original idea, or were the first ones to make a concept actually work in a weapon. And having US weapons data means their could either use the data to incorporate the technology into their own weapons, or use it to defeat American weapons, but they'll never do either because apparently they are lazy, or stupid, or something. None of their weapons are dangerous to US weapons systems, at all.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Internet connection

[meglon]

Actually, if they create a fighter with the performance of the F-35, it wouldn't be a problem at all... as the F-35 is massively expensive http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/f-35-the-most-expensive-fighter-jet-ever-built/ [ritholtz.com], taking years longer to develop http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-27/lockheed-s-troubled-f-35-said-to-be-unscathed-in-budget.html [bloomberg.com], and still can barely get off the ground http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/feature/135080/f_35-reality-check-10-years-on-(part-1).html [defense-aerospace.com]. It is a heaping pile of shith that we didn't need, and don't need, and may never get, and is sucking taxpayer money down like a drunk sailor in Subic bay.

On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, Chinese ingenuity will come up with a way to keep the Osprey from falling out of the sky and killing people (something we can't seem to be able to do). Once they fix that little glitch, maybe we can steal the plans back.

Re:Internet connection

[Savage-Rabbit]

Thing is... a lot of this is about performance. If they create, say, a fighter with the performance of the F-35, then it's a real problem.

Granted, I do remember there being (supposedly) faulty plans during the Cold War that we intentionally allowed the Soviets to get, and when they used it in their pipelines, there were some catastrophic accidents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage [wikipedia.org]

There were all sorts of games like that going on. For example that famous wiretapping coup the CIA/MI6 scored in Berlin. When this operation was eventually discovered by two East German telephone technicians the Soviet KGB was apparently pretty pissed off, something about them knowing about the tunnel and some other Soviet security service (GRU?) exposing it because of lack of inter-service cooperation. Turns out the Soviets already had a mole in that wiretapping project, George Blake. Although the CIA/MI6 claim to this day all the information they got was genuine, that assessment is based on cold war analysis with only limited access to Soviet sources. The KGB archives are still closed so it's entirely possible the Ivans were having a barrel of fun making fake phone calls to spread disinformation or that they simply deemed the information that the CIA/MI6 were gathering was of so little value they did not want to risk blowing Blake's cover by exposing the operation.

Another one of my favorites is a trio of German KGB recruits who borrowed a fully functional AIM-9 Sidewinder missile and drove the thing out of a NATO base in Germany. They stuck the thing into in the back of a Mercedes, only to discover it wouldn't fit so they bashed in the rear window, threw a blanket over the protruding missile and drove it through the German countryside. They then crated the thing up and sent it to Moscow via air freight (freight costs came to a grand total of $79.25) where there were smiles all around at the Vympel NPO missile design bureau. This missile became the basis of the second/third generation Soviet Air force heat seeking missiles (the K13M and its descendants IIRC).

Good times...

Re:Or so they think...

[GameboyRMH]

Maybe it was a honeypot attack by the US. V-22 Osprey? Flying those could thin out the Chinese ranks pretty quick. And the Chinese military could bleed itself dry trying to build F-35s.

Re:Joke's on them.

[Solandri]

That's actually been a factor before. The Soviets copied the B-29 to make the Tu-4 [airforcemag.com]. One of the enormous engineering difficulties they faced was that the specs were all in imperial units. They couldn't just substitute the closest metric equivalent. They had to test each and every part to see if a slightly smaller metric piece would be strong enough, or if they needed to use a slightly bigger metric part to achieve the necessary strength.