CHINA may have forged a quantum supercomputer that can override all Western cybersecurity measures in a terrifying escalation of its hacking prowess.
Fears of Xi’s potential new cyber weapon were sparked after a Chinese hacking group wormed its way into hundreds of US government official’s emails.
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The cyber gang, Storm-0558, burrowed into the private comms of dozens of high-ranking politicians in the US and UK.
China’s victims included Gina Raimondo, the US commerce secretary as well as America’s ambassador to China.
The Storm hackers broke into official systems via a corporate Microsoft account.
Nine months after the concerning breach, experts are still trying to figure out how it was done.
An official US government investigation thinks China could have developed a supercomputer capable of cracking into any and all Western encryption.
If this is the case, infinite measures of cyber security across the UK, US, and elsewhere are essentially useless.
It comes after the UK government revealed it was also victim to two malicious Chinese hacking campaigns on MPs and voters.
American cyber security officials found that China’s hackers had either stolen or replicated a digital key which they dubbed the “cryptographic equivalent of crown jewels”.
The key was used to gain access to government digital infrastructure, opening email accounts from government top brass.
In last year’s attack the hackers stole 60,000 emails from just the State Department.
Microsoft got to work in an “all-hands-on-deck” investigation through the night, scrambling to figure out how their security defences had failed.
A report from the CISA – the US cyber defence agency – said the tech company had over 45 different theories as to how the Chinese hackers carried off their attack.
The theories included scenarios about a “theoretical quantum computing capability to break public-key cryptography”.
It also added in a stark note that Microsoft still does not know exactly how, or when, the Storm hackers got hold of the digital key they needed.
The possibility of such a terrifying quantum computer in the hands of a power like China would be a “nightmare scenario”, chief executive of Brighton-based start-up Universal Quantum told The Telegraph.
What is quantum computing?
QUANTUM computing works completely differently to a traditional computer system.
The tech uses computer science, physics, and maths in quantum mechanics to solve complicated problems incredibly fast.
In theory, it could solve certain questions that would take millions of years on a regular computer in a matter of days.
It could even work out solutions to questions that are impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers.
Where traditional computers work in values of zero or one, quantum computers would use qubits.
These measures can represent a zero, a one or both at the same time.
This allows information to be processed in a completely new and unprecedented way.
Most cyber and security experts agree that China is years away from harnessing this kind of tech.
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