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President Barack Obama on Wednesday created the first sanctions program that would allow the U.S. to penalize individuals and entities overseas who engage in malicious cyberattacks and cyber spying. "Cyber threats pose one of the most serious economic and national security challenges to the United States," Obama said in a statement after signing an executive order creating the sanctions regime. The order gives the U.S. the authority to sanction individuals, though no specific penalties were announced. Obama said the sanctions would apply to those engaged in malicious cyber activity that aims to harm critical infrastructure, damage computer systems, and steal...

SEOUL: The hackers who knocked out tens of thousands of South Korean computers simultaneously this year are out to do far more than erase hard drives, cybersecurity firms say: They also are trying to steal South Korean and US military secrets with a malicious set of codes they’ve been sending through the Internet for years. The identities of the hackers, and the value of any information they have acquired, are not known to US and South Korean researchers who have studied line after line of computer code. But they do not dispute South Korean claims that North Korea is responsible,...

Several months ago, the Pentagon's network and e-mail system fell victim to computer hacking. After an internal investigation, Pentagon officials declared that the hack was perpetrated by the Chinese military. In particular, officials said the attack "was by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) and that it led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates." Now, a Chinese company with ties to the country's military, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger.According to a story in the Washington Times, Huawei Technologies...

China attacks "biased" U.S. cyber-spying report Mon Nov 23, 3:01 am ET BEIJING (Reuters) – China on Monday accused a U.S. congressional advisory panel of bias for a report in which it said the Chinese government appeared increasingly to be piercing U.S. computer networks to gather useful data for its military. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its 2009 report to Congress released last week that there was growing evidence of Chinese state involvement in such activity. But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the report was a twisted attack on China. "This report disregards the...

WASHINGTON -- The Chinese government is ratcheting up its cyberspying operations against the U.S., a congressional advisory panel found, citing an example of a carefully orchestrated campaign against one U.S. company that appears to have been sponsored by Beijing. The unnamed company was just one of several successfully penetrated by a campaign of cyberespionage, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to be released Thursday. Chinese espionage operations are "straining the U.S. capacity to respond," the report concludes...