Noisy China: Cyber conflict and population as capability

Why does China show up in the media about cyber espionage, war, and such so often? Other than the simplistic answer is they are hacking the living dawg puddle out of everybody there has to be a reason for the media barrage. We can come up with a few clues even if they aren’t formalized or scientific. If you have a population of 1.35 BILLION people your normalized curve of people capable of engaging in cyber conflict and espionage is going to dwarf by orders of magnitude somebody like the United States.  

This is Graph A showing a normalized curve of populations from a point of quiet to noisy. Click to make larger.

Graph A is based on an expectation that if skill were a vector the really skilled entities would be very quiet and the less skilled entities would be very noisy. Consider the examples of the script kiddies and low level criminals in the news as reasons why this might be true.Though it is hard to see the US and Chinese curves actually nearly merge at the far ends of the graphed points. A nod to the Chinese has them showing more skill since they do have access to the same body of literature and schooling that the United States does with the associated equivalent to five times the US population or human resource pool.

Graph B shows a normalized US curve with a two sigma skew to the Chinese population curve. Click to make larger.

Graph B shows the two sigmas worth of skew to the left of the Chinese that might be suggested by many. In other words the Chinese example now reflects the lower information communications and technology inherent in the Chinese population. With less broadband penetration and fewer computers per individual we might expect that the uptake would be slower or dampened. That though actually would make the Chinese environment more noisy as depicted in Graph B.

Any good statistician will have a field day explaining why this theory is wrong, why the simplicity of the concept is fraught with error, but the interesting element is that there isn’t a lot of work attempting to define this. The good question being why is China so much in the media and the similar demographic of India isn’t being talked about so much? To me noisy is found out about because of low skill and quiet is the sneaky (e.g.  guys in Langley and Fort Meade). That makes for some interesting discussions for sure. The thread of discussion also has us thinking about the actual threat landscape versus the media portrayal.