Reddit reviews America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare

http://www.amazon.com/America-Vulnerable-Digital-Espionage-Warfare/dp/159420313X

China, like many other countries don't have the legal wall erected between intelligence services and corporations that we do. There are dozens of examples of even European governments using their intel agencies to steal trade and corporate secrets. Don't get me wrong, I think the US spies on privately held companies as much as the next guy but the information gleamed there is duly classified and not available to anyone without clearance.

This is the book I was talking about before. America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare.

You should check it out, it's very informative yet scary at the same time. It was written by Joel Brenner who wasn't the DCI for the CIA (I was mistaken in my original comment), he was the "inspector general of the National Security Agency, then as the head of counterintelligence for the director of national intelligence."

>then it will only be a matter of time before stuxnet, duqu, flame et al are reverse-engineered and deployed against American interests.

It's been a while since I listened to the audio book of it but I believe this was a major concern of his.

There's so much we don't know. Something gleamed from the book was that the US was the first to major player in hacking other countries. Today China ranks number one in hacking attempts on other countries but in the 80's and 90's America was number one. Cyber weapons like Stuxnet might as well be as powerful as nuclear arms. China has definitely penetrated our power grid and other crucial systems. However, if China ever did launch an attack the US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) would retaliate.

The mission statement of CyberCom:

>According to the US Department of Defense, USCYBERCOM "plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

We are probably in their systems too, just like they are in ours. It's the nuclear arms race all over again. All the major powers have nukes...who's going to be the first to use them? Who's going to pull the trigger first?

It's probably better that most people don't know that we are living a few mouse clicks and keystrokes away from being sent back to the stone-age.

Yes, and I think that LulzSec will, in the not-too-distant future, be viewed as a sort of predecessor army or online militia to the ones that will define warfare in the future and are already defining warfare now. This was very clearly prophesied by this book, published in January 2007--and China is the main 'actor':

http://www.amazon.com/Breakpoint-Richard-Clarke/dp/0399153780

And from April 2010:

http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-War-Threat-National-Security/dp/0061962236

And a related one by another author, from September 2011:

http://www.amazon.com/America-Vulnerable-Digital-Espionage-Warfare/dp/159420313X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y

> At a security conference in 2002, after citing statistics that indicate that less than 0.0025 percent of corporate revenue on average is spent on information-technology security, Clarke was famously heard to say, "If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked."[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke

Then see these bits of news, from February 2011, and here's China:

Bloomberg.com: Exxon, Shell Said to Have Been Hacked Via Chinese Servers

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-24/exxon-shell-bp-said-to-have-been-hacked-through-chinese-internet-servers.html

V3.co.uk: Night Dragon hackers targeted Shell, BP and Exxon

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2030642/night-dragon-hackers-targeted-shell-bp-exxon

ComputerWeekly.com: Exxon, Shell, BP hacked in Night Dragon attacks

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280095257/Exxon-Shell-BP-hacked-in-Night-Dragon-attacks