'Cyber cold war' developing says report

By Rachel Williams in London

Guardian News Service: A "cyber cold war" is developing as international web espionage and cyber-attacks become the biggest threats to internet security, according to a report.

The computer security firm McAfee said governments and government-alliedgroups were engaging in increasingly sophisticated cyber spying, with manyattacks originating from China.

Some 120 countries could be developing the capacity for such activities.

What started as probes to see what was possible have become well-fundedand well-organised operations for political, military, economic andtechnical espionage, the report said, with perpetrators aiming to causehavoc by disrupting critical national infrastructure systems.

Targets include air traffic control, financial markets, governmentcomputer networks and utility providers. In September, the London-basedGuardian newspaper reported that Chinese hackers, including some believedto be from the state military, had been attacking the computer networks ofBritish government departments, including the UK Foreign Office. China hasspelled out in a white paper that "informationised armed forces" are partof its military strategy.

McAfee, whose report was compiled with input from Nato, the FBI, and theUK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, said that according to Nato insiders,the wave of cyber attacks that hit Estonia earlier this year, disruptinggovernment, news and bank servers for weeks, was the tip of the iceberg. InMay, the Baltic state said that at least one million computers had beenused in the cyber warfare, which saw hundreds of thousands of hitsbombarding Estonian websites to jam them and make them unusable. The methodused was known as distributed denial of service.

The attack coincided with the climax of a dispute between Moscow andTallinn over a Soviet second world war memorial in the Estonian capital,but officials there backed away from accusing the Kremlin directly. Russianofficials have denied any state responsibility.

In the past 12 months there have been reports of cyber attacks againstgovernment targets in the US, Germany, India, New Zealand and Australia.China has denied any involvement.

"We have seen attempts by a variety of state and non-state-sponsoredorganisations to gain unauthorised access to, or otherwisedegrade,department of defence information systems," a Pentagon spokesmantold researchers.

Nato experts said attackers were using trojan horse software to focus onspecific government offices, and 99% of cases were probably stillundetected. "The complexity and coordination seen during the Estoniaattacks was new," a Nato insider said. "There was a series of attacks withcareful timing using different techniques and specific targets. Theattackers stopped deliberately rather than being shut down."

James Mulvenon, an expert on China's military, who is also director of theCentre for Intelligence and Research in Washington, said the Chinese werethe first to jump "feet first" into 21st-century cyber-warfare technology.

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