Oops: B-roll in TV report said to expose Chinese military cyberattack on US

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Falun-Gong-founded newspaper Epoch Times reports that a "standard, even boring" Chinese military propaganda video broadcast in mid-July on state-run networks revealed screengrabs showing a Chinese military university actively engaged in cyberattacks against the US.

Now, some perspective on the Epoch Times itself is called for before you read. The New York-based publication is closely linked with the banned religious group Falun Gong, and is consistently critical of China and the government's treatment of Falun Gong (as you'll note in this piece). With that caveat out of the way, snip:

The documentary itself was otherwise meant as praise to the wisdom and judgment of Chinese military strategists, and a typical condemnation of the United States as an implacable aggressor in the cyber-realm. But the fleeting shots of an apparent China-based cyber-attack somehow made their way into the final cut.

The screenshots appear as B-roll footage in the documentary for six seconds—between 11:04 and 11:10 minutes—showing custom-built Chinese software apparently launching a cyber-attack against the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, by using a compromised IP address belonging to a United States university. As of Aug. 22 at 1:30pm EDT, in addition to Youtube, the whole documentary is available on the CCTV website.

The screenshots show the name of the software and the Chinese university that built it, the Electrical Engineering University of China's People's Liberation Army—direct evidence that the PLA is involved in coding cyber-attack software directed against a Chinese dissident group.

Read the full story here.

(thanks, Paul Pettross)