China’s spy network

We are at war online – and we are losing

Almost exactly two years ago, an American army officer found a memory stick in a car park in the Middle East and, out of curiosity, inserted it into his military laptop. It seemed to be empty, but there are a million ways of disguising a Trojan computer virus. Instantly, a malicious software code uploaded onto the US Central Command military computer network and embedded itself in the system. And there it lay undetected for weeks, able to send back all manner of classified information. In the words of the deputy US defence secretary, William J. Lynn III, it was ‘poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary’. That unknown adversary was almost certainly China.

Until recently both Britain and America flattered themselves to think that their digital secrets were safe behind fearsome layers of protection. The WikiLeaks fiasco has shown this to be laughably untrue. Just a few years ago, the act of stealing 251,000 secret documents from the Americans was beyond the imagination of fiction writers, let alone the capabilities of spies. But as technology developed, so has the potential for disaster. It seems that a 22-year-old army private in Baghdad with an appetite for mischief, together with a publicity-hungry Australian with a website, have sent the American government and defence establishment reeling.

Suddenly, the western internet ‘firewalls’ are looking like a digital Maginot Line, so vulnerable that amateur hackers can steal hundreds of thousands of secrets for fun. So what might a cyber-army be able to achieve? One answer came last year, when a Chinese software trap was found on the American National Grid, with the aim of shutting down the system entirely. Another came in April, when China hijacked 15 per cent of the world’s internet traffic — emails and data were routed through Chinese servers, where they could be copied or tampered with, and then sent on their way.