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How Xi Jinping looks to the Communist Party to plug cybersecurity gaps
- Party document stipulates that officials should be punished for failing to effectively respond to cyberattacks
- Xi has long shown concern about China’s vulnerabilities, including its ‘ideological security and political security’
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For some, Beijing’s tensions with Washington on the technology front might be a new trend of the past year, but according to a recently released Communist Party document, Beijing was alert to specific cybersecurity concerns back in 2017.
The document, which required all party officials to adhere to President Xi Jinping’s remarks on cybersecurity, stipulated that officials should be punished for failing to effectively respond to cyberattacks and data leakage that could be politically damaging to the party.
The regulation, effective since 2017 but only made public last month, listed six specific examples of cybersecurity failures that should see officials punished, the first being cyberattacks that allowed the spread of negative political messages.
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Those failures include “attacks on party and government websites, key news websites or major web outlets; modifications of the sites allowing the dissemination of reactionary messages, rumours and other harmful information; and not dealing with or reporting [an incident] in a timely way”.
Other examples include attacks leading to the suspension of major websites for more than six hours, as well as the leaking of state secrets and geographic or demographic information, according to the document.
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