The U.S. government has linked China to cyber-attacks on major weapons systems and other U.S. entities, and former Defense Department spokesman J.D. Gordon says that the Chinese are using cyber warfare to overtake the U.S.
"China is trying to overtake the United States militarily, economically, diplomatically and they are trying to be the world's dominant power," Gordon told Ed Berliner on "MidPoint" on
Newsmax TV Tuesday.
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"One of the ways the Chinese are trying to do that is from cyber warfare," he explained.
"They've been attacking us systematically — they've been attacking our military and our industries," he said.
Gordon says that when he was working "at the Pentagon in 2007, we had a massive outage of an unclassified network and that was due to the Chinese."
Gordon claims that "every day you see the Chinese hacking more and more."
"They are stealing secrets from our industries," he explained. And they "are looking for information to gain technical advantages in space and in any type of program that you can imagine."
"The Chinese are hacking into us and they are making the most of it," he added.
The former Defense Department spokesman says that Chinese People's Liberation Army's (PLA) cyber warfare units "are attacking us constantly."
"They are trying to steal information, break into our system and put malware into our emails," he explained.
However, "it's not just the Chinese."
"The North Koreans are attacking us as well, the Russians just attacked JP Morgan — they apparently hacked 83 million accounts, including seven million small business accounts," he said.
Cyber security expert Steven Weisman told the "MidPoint" hosts that cyber warfare "is probably the most serious threat that our country is facing."
"Unfortunately, the government is not doing enough about this, private industry is not doing enough about this, and we can't just throw our hands up in the air and say there's nothing we can do," he explained.
"We need legislation, standards and guidance on this," Weisman said.
He contends that in all the talk from government officials about the cyber attacks that "what doesn't get enough talk is how they actually trick Americans into downloading this onto our computers, and that's where we should be focusing our attention."
Weisman says that there are steps Americans can take to protect themselves against hacking, but that most people "want convenience and we don't want to go through the extra steps that are necessary for security."
"When the internet was first designed, no one envisioned the kind of security problems that were going to be there," he said. "We've got to fix this system retroactively."
Watch part 2 of the video here.