Many experts – including some in the military – argue that cyber weapons could make our networks safer. But will they? Robert Lemos reports from the Conference on Cyber Warfare in Estonia.
[...] Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the Information Warfare Monitor, spent months tracking sensitive computers that were compromised in a manner that seemed to point to the People’s Republic of China as the culprit, but in his presentation at the conference, he underscored that other explanations are possible.
“The obvious elephant in the room is that these are … targets collected by China for intelligence purposes,” Villeneuve said. “All the targets were were able to identify had some value (to China). But there are other explanations. The distribution could be completely random. … Or this could be a total setup. Someone trying to make use of the fact that there is already this frame of reference of attacks emanating from China to disguise their activities. If I was going to attack a third country, I would probably do it through China.”