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Espionage or securing vital information about a rival, nation, company or anybody has always commanded a premium on which governments have spent billions of dollars to set up agencies like FBI, MI4 or KGB, but today hacking computers at vital installations to track sensitive data is where competing agencies, individuals and nations are using the best resources at their commands.
Just imagine! What will happen if all computers stop responding or recognizing domain names or vital information regarding social as well as national security?
This is not an imaginary war game situation rather a hardcore reality that has not only been observed but proved with clear evidences time and again. What is being referred to of course, is cyber espionage by China, wherein the Chinese military has successfully hacked into an unclassified network used by the top policy advisers to the US defense secretary, putting a big question mark over the security measures used to protect the national database and pointing out towards a potential cyber war.
China has constantly been hitting the international headlines, but unfortunately all for wrong reasons, for quite sometime now. After substandard shipments of products and toys, suppression of civil rights and freedom of press, huge environmental litters, now the news of misusing the Web by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) as a virtual battlefield against its potential, in fact existing, political as well as business rivals has raised the concerns across the world, especially the West.
This is not the lone occurrence that China has been on the receiving end and facing the accusations of cyber espionage or web infiltration. In the recent past the Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel also raised the issue, of Chinese infiltration of German government computers, with the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao during her visit to Beijing.
However, China has officially turned all the claims away and denied responsibility of any spying programs straightforwardly. China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu asserted,
The Chinese government has consistently opposed and vigorously attacked according to the law all Internet-wrecking crimes, including hacking. Some people are making wild accusations against China ... They are totally groundless and also reflect a Cold War mentality.
Communication or information systems have always been an essential part of any civil and professional security organization since the advent of computers and the Internet. In contemporary era, there is hardly an organization or state that isn't using the computer in handling and using information through internet.
While computers and communication networks, with modern ways of collecting, storing, processing, and distributing the data, has revolutionized the information system, on the other hand, the overdependence on computers and internet has also made the security measures more vulnerable than ever before.
Now, security of a nation depends upon its ability to withstand cyber warfare rather than conventional manpower. Strategies are prepared as well as implemented, through obnoxious cyber warfare, within the four walls of a room and one need not to battle the enemy face to face. What makes cyber war or hacking more deadly is its capacity to launch a swamped espionage or terrorist assault to bring down some specific systems or capturing sensitive information, paralyzing an entire nation or setup just with a push of a single key. Besides, it is often very difficult to track the exact origin of a particular intrusion.
In the past few years, Beijing has allocated a large share of its ever mounting defense budget to build up more advanced technology, including computer capabilities, switching the army's focus from conventional arms to high technology. China has declared a massive $45bn defense budget in March this year, which is 17.8% more than the last year's even excluding the space program and secret projects, drawing wide attention from the international community.
Though, China's attempt to hack the government or official security sites of its rival nations isn't acceptable in any case, however, it would also be unfair to target or pinpoint a particular nation over its violation of cyber regulations, as almost all the developed (including US) and developing nations and organizations are indulging in the dirty act of gathering information of their political and economic rivals.
