In cyberattacks, blame the victim

[Commentary] It's called The Great Game. Big nations perpetually battle for advantages, going after each other like LeBron James and Stephen Curry tussling for loose balls in the NBA finals. So when China pulls off the hack of this young century -- scarfing up massive amounts of personnel files from the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) -- well, just chalk it up to China being China. Gathering intelligence on other governments is part of The Great Game. And personnel files are exactly the kind of government-controlled information that other nations covet the most. "The real trick in human intelligence," explains Ron Marks, a veteran intelligence officer, "is finding people with access to important people and their information." For the US government, the OPM holds the mother lode of that kind data. By some estimate, over 14 million records were lost. It's a massive treasure trove of information that can help sharpen the targeting for its future intelligence gathering. Point Beijing.

The White House needs to put some real energy -- and creativity -- into its cybersecurity operations. Rather than heap more regulations and red tape on the Internet and its users, Washington should focus on facilitating public and private information-sharing about cyber threats and effective prevention and mitigation responses. Meanwhile, the government needs to get serious about the state-managed cyberthreats that are eating our lunch. Russia and China are our top competitors now. But Iran and North Korea are coming on strong.

[James Jay Carafano is a vice president at The Heritage Foundation]