Taiwan seeks help from the U.S. to improve its readiness against cyberattacks from China.
Taiwan’s financial scheme projects a $760 billion high-tech scrimping, but its susceptibility to crook hacks has inflated concerns since a full-blown cyberattack from China sent its currency and markets into a tailspin.
To bolster its online security, government officials and financial organizations in Taipei are conferring with security experts from the U.S. Treasury Department and cybersecurity firm SimSpace Corp. to run simulated cyberattacks eight-hour drill.
Taiwan Intensive Security Reinforcement
Tabletop cyber exercises are barely new events in Taiwan. But the urgency to bolster digital defenses in Taiwan is crucial, as the island sits in the middle of US-China tensions and a critical presidential election in January.
The report shows a victory by the ruling party could prompt Beijing, which views Taiwan as its domain, to take a more frontal aggressive approach toward Taipei.
Agreeably, Charles Li, chief analyst at Taiwanese cybersecurity firm TeamT5, asserted Taiwan has near zero power to defend itself from these advanced cyberattacks. Furthermore, he enunciates that his firm’s tracking state-sponsored hackers in Taiwan revealed that most of the island’s government agencies and firms attacked last year did not even notice the breach.
Intelligence Sharing Collaboration
A cyberattack by China on Taiwan’s financial security system may be its first action before military action.
In recent years, Chinese officials have declared they would prefer that Taiwan unify with the People’s Republic willingly, but they don’t rule out the use of military force to make it happen and consider efforts to formalize the island’s independence a national security threat.
Besides Boston-based SimSpace, Taiwan officials have also held talks with experts from the US Treasury’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection.
However, while that engagement is still in the early stages, but the collaboration is predicted to help with intelligence sharing on financial security and construct new simulators to mimic large-scale cyberattacks on financial enterprises and trading systems.
