Faculty members at a top Chinese university have collaborated for years on technical research papers with a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit accused of being at the heart of China’s alleged cyberwar against Western commercial targets.
Several papers on computer network security and intrusion detection, easily accessed on the Internet, were co-authored by researchers at PLA Unit 61398 – allegedly an operational unit actively engaged in cyberespionage – and faculty at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a centre of academic excellence with ties to some of the world’s top universities and attended by the country’s political and business elite.
Shanghai Jiao Tong, which is not officially linked to China’s military, set up a joint institute in China’s second city in 2006 with the University of Michigan – seeking, it says on its website, to “develop innovative and highly reputable education and research programs in various engineering fields.” A spokesman for the U.S. college said it has no relationship with SISE. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh also had a partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong’s School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering, and Singapore Management University said it ended a tie-up with SISE last June. Full story
