Chinese cyber espionage and cyber sovereignty: Lack of acceptable behavior in cyberspace

Cyberspace continues to evolve as one of the largest threats to business, national security, and personal information security to global entities. Two distinct issues plague the cyberspace environment, a lack of cyber sovereignty, and the inability to assign attribution to cyber-crime. The laws of physics allow us to define the location of an object, identify the object in time and space, and determine where the object is going. In contrast, our ability to define, track, and identify objects in cyberspace are limited, not by limitations in physics, but through the inability to assign attribution to the large amount of anonymous objects traveling through multiple locations with many different objectives. Cyber criminals use anonymity in cyberspace to their advantage by remaining undetected through multiple host computers globally. To date, there has not been an international agreement as to what constitutes acceptable behavior in cyber space. A large part of the problem is that each country has different ideas as to what cybersecurity means to their society. China blames the US for actions they believe to be unacceptable, while the US blames the Chinese government for substantial loss of intellectual property. Both countries believe they have the correct approach to the cybersecurity issue, but international leaders are still trying to understand cyberspace as technology continues to evolve at a pace far exceeding policy or international agreements. Global cyber sovereignty in the current international construct is likely an unachievable goal in the near term. Cyberspace repeatedly crosses borders through networks spawned across the globe with civilian and military Internet users. In Cyberspace, an effective offensive breach, whether it is a cyber-attack or loss of capabilities through cyber espionage, only has to be successful once.