Published: October 12, 2008 11:09 pm      

Is Chinese military sabotaging major American servers?

CHARLESTON — Is the Chinese government deliberately flooding main computer servers in America — even the West Virginia Legislature’s own site — in a trial run by military forces to disrupt the nation’s economy?

Delegate Ray Canterbury, R-Greenbrier, raised that frightening prospect Sunday after the Joint Committee on Technology learned that the Legislature’s own Web site has been jammed of late with massive “attacks,” or requests for information.

“The intent is purely disruption,” Dennis Loudermilk, network administrator for the Legislative Automated Systems Division, told the panel. “There are a lot of these out there.”

Since the inquiries for information contained what appeared to be addresses in China, Sen. Roman Prezioso, D-Marion, wondered aloud if this were some kind of subterfuge by the Communist nation to assault main servers in the United States and disable American systems.

“I would hope not,” Loudermilk said. “You never know.”

Canterbury, himself an Internet entrepreneur in Ronceverte, told the committee that this kind of activity could spawn unlimited chaos throughout the United States.

“We’re so dependent on computers,” he said.

What has been occurring is that voluminous queries have poured into the Legislature’s site and the effect has been to bog down the entire system, Loudermilk said. Briefly, the Legislature’s site was offline.

“We’re devoting more and more time to security,” he told the technology committee. “It’s ramping up more substantially. They want to disrupt the economy and the American way of life.”

Afterward, there was little doubt in Canterbury’s mind that the source was the Chinese government and the motive was evil, based on informed speculation.

Canterbury alluded to a recent media report that suggested the Chinese military is orchestrating the operation in search of vulnerability in American computer networks.

“I think this is a trial run,” Canterbury said. “A series of trial runs, to see if they can develop the technology that will allow them to cause a major widespread disruption. Just goes to show that China is not really our friend.”

How this works, if it indeed is a plot to disrupt major computer systems, he explained, is that proxy servers hijack the systems and simultaneously seek data from individual servers.

“What happens, you get so many simultaneous requests and you just get bogged down responding to junk requests,” Canterbury said.

“You’re crippled. There are all kinds of speculation — and it’s not just idle speculation — but informed speculation throughout the cyber community it’s from China and it’s probably the Chinese government. The consensus is that it’s coming out of the Chinese government.”

— E-mail:

mannix@register-herald.com