Intellectual Property Law

They're baaaack.

Those impish Chinese government cyber-saboteurs we last saw posing as 20-foot high trees to trigger the 2003 northeast power outage have returned in an all new adventure, this time in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

In this episode, the clever hackers have teamed with the Russians to penetrate the U.S. electrical grid from coast-to-coast, planting diabolical malware designed to let them plunge portions of America into darkness with a few keystrokes, the paper reports.

The real authors of this tale are unnamed "U.S. intelligence officials," perhaps the same ones who claimed last year that the Chinese government may have caused the 2003 blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.

Sadly, this new installment doesn't contain the kind of juicy details that made the previous one so easy to debunk. In fact, it contains almost no details at all. The attacks are "pervasive," and yet not a single utility company is named as a victim. Even better, the blackout-triggering malware hasn't been spotted by the companies -- which explains perfectly why this is the first we've heard of it.  Only America's intelligence community has seen the code. They could show us, but then they'd have to kill us.

The unspoken lesson here is obvious: Chinese Superhackers Are Our Superiors. No, wait. That's not it. I know ... Only the intelligence agencies are equipped to protect us from foreign cyber attacks.

It's an unusually opportune time for this revelation, since the NSA is at this very moment jockeying to take over cyber security from DHS, which lacks the wholesale warrantless-wiretapping capabilities needed to detect Chinese hackers. What a lucky coincidence of timing that this exciting, if uncheckable, story should emerge now.

See Also:

• Outgoing DHS Cyber Chief Expands on Why He Resigned
• NSA Should Oversee Cybersecurity, Intel Chief Says
• NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to 'Grave Peril', Ex-Cyber Chief Tell Congress
• No Chinese Hackers Found in Florida Outage Either
• Did Hackers Cause the 2003 Northeast Blackout? Umm, No