China’s PLA seeks to bring cyberwarfare units under one roof

Unified command would allow military to create specialised forces as well as give leaders greater control over cyberspies who may be acting on their own, experts say

China’s military chiefs are seeking to unify the country’s cyberwarfare capabilities as they build a modern fighting force that relies less on ground troops.

The plan is part of a broader shift towards a unified military command similar to that of the US to meet President Xi Jinping’s goal of transforming the People’s Liberation Army into a force that can “fight and win modern wars”.

iCloud users’ login details apparently being intercepted in China

Chinese authorities are attacking users who are connecting to Apple’s iCloud website in what appears to be a surveillance push to steal users’ login credentials, according to a Chinese censorship monitoring group.

In the attack, which was first reported over the weekend, less than 24 hours after the new iPhone 6 went on sale in China, connections to iCloud.com were hijacked and stripped of the usual encryption that prevents hackers and government spies from intercepting the username and password typed by someone connecting to the site.

This is another example of what is technically known as a “man-in-the-middle” (MITM) attack, in which an attacker intercepts a connection between a user and a website in order to steal or tamper with the data being exchanged. In the past year alone, China has been accused of intercepting connections with a MITM attack against Github, Google, and, more recently, Yahoo, in what was seen as an attempt to censor information on the Hong Kong protests.

After several users reported the attack online, the anti-Chinese censorship activist group GreatFire tweeted about the MITM attack on Saturday. The group later published more details in a blog post on Monday.