China's Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, has published a front page article hitting out at accusations that the Chinese state was behind hacks on publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
The article, which appears to be published as an op-ed, is not currently on People's Daily's English-language website (it can be read in Mandarin here) but Mark Stone of Sky News has published some extracts:
"America keeps labelling China as hackers, simply playing up the rhetoric of the 'China threat' in cyberspace, providing new justification for America's strategy of containing China."
"Even those with little understanding of the internet know that hacking attacks are transnational and concealable.
"IP addresses simply do not constitute sufficient evidence to confirm the origins of hackers."
Perhaps (for once) this Chinese state newspaper op-ed has a point. Last week cybersecurity analyst and expert Jeffrey Carr wrote a blog post that detailed his own doubts about China being behind the hack:
Asian politics and economics are pivotal in some way to every developed and developing nation in the world. And the New York Times has its finger on the pulse of that region. The list of potential culprits who could have breached the Times network for information on Asia is far longer than just China.
On the other hand, People's Daily is the same newspaper that took an Onion article about Kim Jong-un being the sexiest man ever seriously.
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