This week Chinese President Xi Jinping will be visiting Washington. During a state dinner, President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart are expected to discuss climate change, international business, and, cybersecurity. That last item has recently been a sensitive issue between the two countries, after the United States has repeatedly accused China of hacking US corporations and government infrastructure.
Those disputes have turned the state dinner into an opportunity for candidates to try to score some points. During last Wednesday’s debate for GOP presidential candidates, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker doubled down on his call for Obama to cancel the dinner over the alleged hacking, among other issues. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said the dinner should go on, but he came close to calling on the United States to launch a cyberwar against China.
“We should use offensive tactics as it relates to cyber security, send a deterrent signal to China,” Bush said during the debate. “There should be super sanctions in what President Obama has proposed. There’s many other tools that we have without canceling a dinner. That’s not going to change anything, but we can be much stronger as it relates to that.”
The spotlight will be on China, but the country is hardly alone in cyber aggression. Cybersecurity is an international issue, and attacks are happening all the time, all around the world. This map below from Kapersky Lab, a cybersecurity firm, illustrates that point. It shows different types of attacks coded with different colors, as well as the source of the attack and the target. Click on the map to get more information: