NOAA Employee Charged With Computer Breach Met Senior Chinese Official in Beijing

This is a new development in what was previously posted, showing the level of access and its official state support.

 

A federal weather service employee charged with stealing sensitive infrastructure data from an Army Corps of Engineers database met a Chinese government official in Beijing, according to court documents that reveal the case to be part of an FBI probe of Chinese economic espionage.

Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, an employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) office in Ohio, was arrested in October and charged in a federal grand jury indictment with illegally accessing the Army’s National Inventory of Dams (NID).

The NID is a sensitive database containing information on all U.S. dams. U.S. intelligence officials have said the database was compromised by Chinese hackers in 2013 as part of covert efforts by Beijing to gather sensitive information on critical U.S. infrastructure for possible use in a future conflict.

Chinese Woman Arrested for Downloading Files on Vulnerabilities in US Dams

It’s not hard to imagine, after obtaining information such as this, seeing key dams failing. How would this happen? Not necessarily with terrorist bombings, but with cyberwarfare. If you wanted to physically take them down via power grids, as a professional hit team had done in California, you need only to take out nine substations to indefinitely cripple America and potentially kill hundreds of millions from the aftereffect. It’s already on the edge of failure now as we speak. On the cyberwarfare front, you only need to take advantage of the SCADA system (See also HERE and HERE) that remains largely unprotected and vulnerable as well.

America is in the final phase of a perfect storm overseeing its collapse (on the economic and social front as well) that could happen at any given time as it is now past the point of no return in protecting itself. It can’t even screen itself from espionage in its vital infrastructure, as seen in this article. Having said that, it’s not hard to see that America’s adversaries have first strike capability, and therefore likely checkmate.

But hey, no time for that, we have a MLB World Series to watch and cheap (sometimes toxic) Chinese goods to scuffle over on Black Friday.

 

A sensitive database that lists vulnerabilities in every major U.S. dam was breached last year in an attack traced back to the Chinese regime. The security breach had U.S. officials worried that China could be planning to attack America’s power grid.

Now, one year later, a Chinese woman was arrested for breaching that same network. Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, 59, was arrested on Oct. 20 for allegedly downloading the sensitive files on U.S. dams and for lying to federal investigators.

The registry Chen allegedly accessed and downloaded ranks the dams by the number of Americans who would die if they failed, according to Nextgov. It also lists vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the dams, which could be used by a hostile nation to attack the United States.