Bush Taking Cyber-Threats Seriously

The Pentagon was attacked earlier this year, in June, by hackers that managed to take down a part of the Americans' computers. Rumor has it the attacks were "made in China" but no one has officially confirmed this.

I think that the rumors are true, since I read a few days ago in the press that president Bush will tackle this problem and have a "chat" with Chinese President Hu Jintao. If there had been no problem, he wouldn't have needed to say anything, would he? This was supposed to happen on Thursday when the two leaders met, but did not. They only talked about economic relations, climate change and some other things, but nothing cyberwar-related.

In any case, President Bush said that the US needs to be secure against such threats, no matter from where they come and if he has sufficient intelligence pointing out that the Chinese are behind this, he will bring the problem up to them.

In a White House Transcript (see it in full here), Mr. Bush stated the following: "We understand that we're vulnerable in some systems -- some, by the way, more valuable than others -- or less valuable than others, I guess is the best way to put it.
In terms of whether or not I'll bring this up to countries that we suspect may -- from which there may have been an attack, I may. In this instance, I don't have the intelligence at my fingertips right now. Whether it be this issue, or issues like intellectual property rights, I mean, if you have a relationship with a country, then you've got to respect the country's systems and knowledge base."

In my opinion, this is the diplomatic way of saying "Hey, I respect you, but if you hack my computers, you're going to regret it!"