NO NATION state has ever been definitively linked to an act of cyber warfare, but the internet is certainly being used as a battlefield. Even though governments are not owning up to it, two recent events make state involvement look more likely than ever.

Earlier this year, security firm VirusBlokAda discovered a highly sophisticated computer worm called Stuxnet. It was unusual in that it was designed to secretly infect and commandeer industrial computer systems. Most of the sites affected were in Iran, and the worm’s sophistication together with the choice of target suggest the involvement of a state, possibly Israel. It is likely that the worm was designed to disrupt the country’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges, a suspicion bolstered when the Iranian government recently confirmed that Stuxnet had “created problems” at its facility in Natanz.

Then came the WikiLeaks cables. The massive trove of documents revealed that US officials believe the Chinese government is in cahoots with hacking groups such as the Honker Union and XFocus. The latter is known in security circles for building the Blaster worm – software that in 2003 spread between Windows PCs and tried to attack a Microsoft website. In a world of computer crime, where attribution is often impossible to assign, that’s as close to a smoking gun as you get.

The cables also show that the hackers behind the Aurora and Byzantine Candor attacks may have had ties to Beijing.


What of America’s involvement in internet warfare? This May saw the launch of US Cyber Command, a military effort devoted to defending the country’s computer networks and, presumably, attacking those of its enemies. Hot young coders are being tempted away from Silicon Valley and into classified cyber projects. The military of course will not say what these new hacker-soldiers are up to, but no one expects them to stand by and watch should a conflict break out.

Read more: WikiLeaks wars: Digital conflict spills into real life