Cyber-War (continued)

Regular readers of this blog (Which I suspect includes members of various national intelligence services. Welcome, guys!) know that I write frequently about the dangers of the current and ongoing "cyberwar" being conducted by various governmental and non-governmental entities, such as China and Al Qeada, respectively.

Therefore, I am not shocked by this MSNBC story headline:

TORONTO - A cyber spy network based mainly in China has tapped into classified documents from government and private organizations in 103 countries, including the computers of Tibetan exiles, Canadian researchers said Saturday.

The work of the Information Warfare Monitor initially focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community in exile, and eventually led to a much wider network of compromised machines, the Internet-based research group said.

"We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama," investigator Greg Walton said.

and this:

In an online abstract for "The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement," Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson write that while malware attacks are not new, these attacks should be noted for their ability to collect "actionable intelligence for use by the police and security services of a repressive state, with potentially fatal consequences for those exposed."

They say prevention against such attacks will be difficult since traditional defense against social malware in government agencies involves expensive and intrusive measures that range from mandatory access controls to tedious operational security procedures.

When you combine China's active cyber warfare efforts with the recent determinations by our government of Chinese military buildups here and here and the Secretary of Defense's Annual Report to Congress :Military Power of the People’s Republic of China here, one is forced to conclude that the Chinese government is in the midst of a long-term and well thought out campaign to construct a modern military force that includes air, naval, space and cyber capabilities with long range and international capabilities.