14 DAY TRIAL // After in May 2011 the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) revealed the fact that an Online Blue Army had been established with the purpose of improving China’s ability to defend its military networks, now it seems that the project is taking shape.
According to ECNS, the country’s military experts claim that the project is still in an early stage if compared to the projects of other states, for the time being utilized in “online maneuver mode”, instead of a real online army.
While some believe that this Blue Army is composed by highly-trained hackers ready at any minute to carry out attacks against the critical networks owned by other countries, officials keep pointing the finger at others such as the US, UK, Russia, Japan and India, stating that they also have similar armies.
The Blue Army name has nothing to do with the fact that in army lingo the blue teem represents the defending side or the good guys, or at least that’s what officials declare.
Regular people, those who don’t have access to restricted military secrets, may never find out the true purpose of China’s Online Blue Army, but officially, it became a necessity, especially after recent reports revealed that the country’s online infrastructures are constantly targeted by threats coming from cyberspace.
Out of the 505 million Internet users in China close to half of them were attacked by malware in the first half of 2011, some of them directly affecting the country’s economy.
So what do Chinese people think about their government’s initiative?
“Besides fighting skills of the soldiers in the battlefield, the modern war focuses more on technology and the Internet. Strengthening the national defense Internet construction is another new requirement of the national security. Therefore, the government should attach great importance to the Internet national defense,” reads a comment left to the original Chinese article.