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Lockheed hack highlights cyber-blame snags

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CIOL Bureau
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Jim Wolf and Jim Finkle

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WASHINGTON, USA: Past patterns may point to China, but top investigators say they will never know for sure who mounted a "significant" cyberattack against Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 arms supplier.

Lockheed, which is also the government's top information technology provider, said on Sunday it was a "frequent target of adversaries around the world."

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The company has not disclosed which of its business units was targeted, but people with experience plugging holes after such strikes said that cyberspies likely sought trade secrets or weapons-related data.

The Bethesda, Maryland-based company did not respond to a request to clarify whom it deemed adversaries, and whether it suspected a foreign state in the digital assault it said it had detected "almost immediately" on May 21.

Lockheed said it had countered with stepped-up security measures and that no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised in the "significant and tenacious attack" on its information systems network.

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China has generally emerged as a prime suspect when it comes to keyboard-launched espionage against U.S. interests, although the Pentagon says more than 100 foreign intelligence groups have been trying to pierce U.S. networks.

"China's government, the Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese individuals and organizations continue to hack into American computer systems and networks as well as those of foreign entities and governments," the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its 2010 annual report to Congress.

The body was created by the Congress in 2000 to advise it on implications of trade with China. It said in its report the methods used in suspected Chinese-launched attacks were growing more sophisticated and increasingly piggy-backing on social networking tools.

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BEIJING DISMISSES CHARGES

Beijing, at odds with the United States over Taiwan and other issues, has "laced U.S. infrastructure with logic bombs," a cyberweapon, former U.S. National Security Council official Richard Clarke wrote in his 2010 book "Cyber War."

Beijing steadfastly dismisses such charges.

"I'd say it's just irresponsible to arbitrarily link China to such cyber hacking activities in each and every turn," Wang Baodong, the Chinese Embassy spokesman in Washington, said in an email to Reuters. "As a victim itself, China is firmly against hacking activities and strongly for international cooperation on this front".

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