A Bloodless Attack

China stealthily invaded the German government's computer systems last month, and seems to have struck again:

the People's Liberation Army, or PLA, assaulted part of the Pentagon's system used by policy advisers to the defence secretary, Robert Gates, is the latest and potentially most serious breach and set alarm bells ringing across the US military.

There are also reports of Chinese hackers "attacking the computer networks of British government departments."

What is behind this recent flurry of Chinese Internet warfare? Does the People's Republic have a rogue hacker on their hands, or is this a series of well-timed cyber-raids to spook the West?

Regardless, this threat has been overlooked and under reported for some time, and will probably remain so until something seriously wrong goes down.