Taiwan, a small island near to the borders of China and Japan says that countries like China, Russia, and North Korea are using the nation as a testing mule for an onslaught of cyber attacks. The leaders of the nation say that China and Russia are using it as a testing ground before targeting the US and other western countries such as the UK and Canada.
Taiwanese Government feels that the said cyber adversaries are testing new malware tools to target government agencies. And Taiwan’s foreign and economy ministries have so far been targeted in the said cyber attacks.
“The number of cyber attacks will rise before the elections. As hackers and some state-funded agencies will try to intervene in the upcoming elections”, said Howard Jyan, Director General, Cybersecurity Department, Taiwan.
Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders have to notify a fact over here that Beijing feels that Taiwan, the self-ruled island is a part of its territory. But as the leaders of Taiwan refused to accept this as a fact, the People’s Republic of China wants to pressurize its neighbor in all spheres to accept Beijing’s ruling as a fact.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-Wen said in a recent media interaction that her country has endured 360 cyber attacks in 2017 which were launched to compromise sensitive and classified data.
Ms. Wen feels that most of them were from China as they were targeted at the servers in the civil, military and research departments.
Taiwan is all set to go for local elections in November 2018 and the results can show the effect on the next legislative and presidential elections of 2020. So, Taiwan’s intelligence agencies say that countries like China and Russia and to some extent North Korea have been/can launch cyber attacks to influence the poll results- like how Russia did in US 2016 Elections with false news and discord sowing tactics among the US populace.
