The National Security Bureau (NSB) plans to establish a cybersecurity department in the near future to improve the government’s computer surveillance amid heightened cyberattacks that China launches to simulate similar strikes on Western countries.
China’s “Internet army” initiated more than 7.22 million cyberattacks on the bureau’s Web sites in the past year, including 230,000 hostile attacks, the bureau said.
Currently, the only authority capable of dealing with the cyberattacks is the Ministry of National Defense’s Office for Communications, Electronics and Information, which was established to counter Chinese cyberthreats, the bureau said.
The planned department would specialize in guarding the government’s information security and key infrastructure systems, while the office would have command over military cyberdefense.
The department would be responsible for collecting intelligence, research and development, organizing anti-hacking operations and reacting to credible cyberthreats involving national security, the bureau said.
Bureau Director-General Lee Shying-jow (李翔宙) last year said that if the government set up an authority responsible for cyberwarfare, it should be established under an intelligence agency so as to wage cyberwar more effectively.
The bureau’s six existing departments are responsible for international and domestic intelligence collection, intelligence analysis, sci-tech intelligence gathering and code control, the bureau said.
A seventh department in charge of cybersecurity is to be established shortly to deter Chinese cyberattacks, the bureau added.
The National Intelligence Services Act (國家情報工作法) stipulates that the bureau is the authority supervising intelligence operations, including intelligence collection, analysis, processing and application, the bureau said, adding that many countries have ranked cyberspace as the “fifth territory” — which is of equal importance as territorial land, waters, airspace and outerspace — and the bureau deems it necessary to reinforce Taiwan’s defenses against extensive cyberthreats by establishing a new cybersecurity department.
The department would cooperate with the National Security Council and the National Information and Security Taskforce under the framework of national information security, the bureau added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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