Cyber espionage from state governments? Don't be surprised

Did the Chinese government, for strategic purposes, infiltrate more than 1,200 computers in 103 countries to spy on nations' embassies and government agencies, in addition to the NATO military alliance and even the Deloitte & Touche consultancy?

While not claiming absolute proof, the just-released report "Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network" says "circumstantial evidence" strongly suggests "this set of high profile targets has been exploited by the Chinese state for military and strategic-intelligence purposes."
The Chinese government strongly refutes those charges, calling them "rumors about so-called Internet spies" and "entirely fabricated." But some say it's naïve to presume that China -- and the United States and other nations as well -- don't engage in cyber-espionage.

"It's part of the intelligence game. I suspect we know exactly what's happening," says Murray Jennex, associate professor in the Information and Decision Systems Department at San Diego State University.

Jennex, who says he spent time in Eastern Europe working on utilities projects, directly experienced cyber-espionage incidents when his e-mail was intercepted and fed to newspapers.

The point, he says, is that cyber-espionage is real and governments do it, and the kind of things that China is accused of in the GhostNet report might also be something that other countries, including the United States, might stand accused of one day, too.

"Our own people may be doing the same thing," Jennex says. He says cyber-espionage, far from being an aberration, is in some respects "a normal thing that will happen and continue to happen."

The GhostNet report -- which claims there's a vast espionage network of compromised government and industry computers around the world linked back to China -- is the collaborative effort of investigators associated with SecDev Group and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.

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