UK and China sign cyber-attack agreement -- but will it be honored?

Chinese president Xi Jinping, and the British prime minister David Cameron, signed an agreement saying the two countries won’t hack and steal each other’s secrets.

A similar agreement was signed between China and the US, just a day before a Chinese cyber-attack against the States.

The agreement was signed during Jinping’s visit to Britain, as the Chinese president tries to fix the country’s reputation of being the world’s biggest hacking menace and the biggest distributor of malware, right after that "hottest chick nearby" ad. "It sets out very clearly what they agree they will not do", a Downing Street spokeswoman said.

In an effort to repair the country’s image, in August the state announced the arrests of 15,000 people suspected of internet security crimes. Pretty much every time a cyber-attack on a state institution, or particular industry is unveiled, the finger is pointed at China.

In one of recent such attacks, which China obviously denied having anything to do with, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was attacked.

The breach affected OPM’s IT systems and its data stored at the Department of the Interior’s data centre, which is a shared service centre for federal agencies, a DHS official said on condition of anonymity. The official would not comment on whether other agencies’ data had been affected.

It is also being reported that the Chinese are using "Great Cannon" to launch DDoS attacks.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have discovered the Great Cannon after coding site GitHub was grounded by a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attack particularly focused on users of the site with a history of trying to circumvent China’s censorship programs: The New York Times’ Chinese mirror and GreatFire.org.

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