Clarke: China has already hacked every major U.S. company

Richard Clarke, former cybersecurity and cyberterrorism adviser to the White House, says he’s not exaggerating when he says every major U.S. company has been hacked by China. “The evidence is pretty strong,” Clarke says in a recent interview with Smithsonian. Clarke—who worked for the U.S. government for 30 years under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—says state-sanctioned Chinese hackers are stealing research and development from U.S. companies, and are in turn threatening the long-term competitiveness of America. “My greatest fear is that, rather than having a cyber–Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it,” says Clarke, who released a book titled Cyber War in 2010. “That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China … after a while you can’t compete.” Check out the full story here.