The main suspect in this and similar attacks is China, though what affiliation, if any, the hackers had with the Chinese government remains unclear. According to the Washington Post, “China is building massive databases of Americans’ personal information by hacking government agencies and U.S. health-care companies, using a high-tech tactic to achieve an age-old goal of espionage: recruiting spies or gaining more information on an adversary.”

But these attacks are not limited to espionage, and there is not always a government behind them. Many independent hackers make a living off their criminal activities on the Internet; extortion, thefts of commercial secrets and people’s identities, breaches of databases belonging to retailers and other companies, and the sabotage of critical infrastructure are all proliferating. To cite just four recent examples: Hackers have stolen personal information from 83 million JPMorgan Chase accounts, 56 million Home Depot payment cards, 110 million Target customer records, and 80 million accounts belonging to Anthem, one of America’s largest health-insurance companies. “Our information systems are attacked multiple times a day, every day,” the president of one of the world’s largest electricity companies told me. Nowadays, he added, “We spend 10 times more protecting ourselves from cyber attacks than we did three years ago. And despite that we feel we are always a step behind our attackers.”

Numerous reports indicate that the frequency of and damage inflicted by cyber attacks is steadily increasing. According to a recent Verizon report on data breaches in the United States, the main victims are the government and the financial-services and information and technology industries, with the healthcare sector, and especially hospitals and health-insurance companies, also frequent targets. And the threat isn’t only coming from China—experts emphasize that attacks from Russia are as aggressive, frequent, and sophisticated. And thanks to Snowden and others, we know that several U.S. government agencies are also actively engaged in cyber espionage, cyber sabotage, and cyber attacks.

Still, in this respect, the United States and other technologically advanced democracies can’t be placed in the same category as Russia, China, or North Korea. In the U.S. political system, despite all its imperfections, there is still a strong separation of powers, functioning checks and balances, an active and independent media, and a legal system designed to ensure that government officials who break the law are held accountable and don’t enjoy the impunity their colleagues in Moscow and Beijing do. U.S.-based criminal networks don’t operate internationally knowing that they can rely on the protection of friends and accomplices at the highest levels of government.