Obama threatens China with retaliatory actions over cyber attacks

US President Barack Obama has vowed to take retaliatory actions against China in response to its alleged cyber attacks against American targets.

“We are preparing a number of measures that indicate this is not just a matter of us being mildly upset,” Obama said during a meeting on Wednesday with corporate executives at the Business Roundtable in Washington.  

The Business Roundtable is a conservative organization of chief executive officers of top US corporations established to promote pro-business public policy.

The US president was not specific about the nature of the measures, but according to the White House spokesman Josh Earnest, Obama was “intentionally non-specific” in this regard.

Obama added that the US is “still the best” when it comes to cyber warfare and “If we want to go on offense, a whole bunch of countries would have significant problems.”

“We don’t want to see the Internet weaponized,” Obama said. “Our goal is to have them as a partner in helping to have a set of international rules and norms that help everybody.”

The president made it clear that from his point of view, there is a difference between governments hacking as a routine intelligence gathering measure and computer-based attacks that aim to harm economic activities or steal trade secrets.

“That is fundamentally different from your government or its proxies engaging directly in industrial espionage and stealing trade secrets, stealing proprietary information from companies,” Obama said. “That we consider industrial espionage.”

The United States is reportedly mulling a sanctions regime against Chinese companies and individuals it believes are linked to the hacking of US trade secrets.

Experts speculate that US sanctions against Chinese companies could prompt Beijing to cancel President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States next week.

Earlier this week, US intelligence chiefs warned that cyber attacks had replaced terrorism as the main security threat to the United States.

For years, Washington has been accusing the Chinese government and military of conducting cyber attacks against the US, including efforts to steal information from various government agencies.

The White House claims that the Chinese military has made cyber warfare capabilities a priority over the past decade and often blames people with links to Beijing for hacking into US companies’ computers to steal secrets.

China, however, dismisses the claims and says Washington’s cyber attack accusations are hypocritical, since intelligence leaks have revealed numerous times that the US itself is the most active perpetrator of cyber espionage against other countries.

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