Following GitHub attack, Obama declares US cybersecurity a ‘national emergency’

US president Barack Obama has issued an executive order declaring a national emergency due to the threat posed by cyber attacks.

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US president Barack Obama said that country increasingly faced 'severe and malicious' cyber attacks from overseas. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:15am, 2 Apr 2015Updated: 11:44am, 9 Apr 2015

US president Barack Obama has issued an executive order declaring a national emergency due to the threat posed by cyber attacks.

The order empowers the US Treasury to use financial sanctions against foreign actors who threaten critical infrastructure, seek to steal financial data or trade secrets, or launch denial-of-service attacks.

In the order, Obama said that he found "the increasing prevalence and severity of malicious cyber-enabled activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States."

The move comes after a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on GitHub, the US-based open-source code repository. According to researchers, attackers hijacked widely used analytics tools offered by Chinese search engine Baidu to redirect visitors to thousands of websites to GitHub, flooding the site's servers. (In a statement, Baidu denied that its services were used in the attack.)

Hackers were targeting two anti-censorship tools hosted on GitHub and created by activist group GreatFire, whose own website was hit with a severe DDoS attack earlier this month.

"Based on the technical forensic evidence provided above and the detailed research that has been done on the GitHub attack, we can now confidently conclude that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is responsible for both of these attacks," said GreatFire's Charlie Smith (a pseudonym) following the GitHub attack.