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.
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 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.
“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.” Sun Tzu
So on one hand to borrow from a pop culture reference, the Chinese whether noisy and or rudimentary in the publicized attacks can successfully pull of a Zerg rush in this realm. Each little zergling itself is harmless but when multiplied 10 , 100,1000 fold the weight of even rudimentary attacks are successful at destruction.
I don’t believe this is what we have to worry about. We need to fear and prepare for what they haven’t done or attempted because our conventional wisdom tells us hey are incapable or unwilling.