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The stickiest fingers on the Web

When it’s common knowledge that everyone’s up to something less than legal it’s the being caught seems to cause most problems - all the other similarly guilty parties able to take the moral high ground and point haughtily at those with the stickiest fingers. Latest web villains, caught with their hands in the cyber cookie jar – no, not the French - are the Chinese.

Cyber spying? Electronic spy networks which experts claim may have infiltrated computers in government offices around the world? It couldn’t be!

Over recent weeks the world has sat back aghast, as claims of a Chinese ‘Ghostnet’ hacking into classified documents on government and private computers in no less than 103 countries as well as thousands of NATO computers and foreign ministries, embassies, banks and news organisations across the world.

Whilst chaste western security agencies have been distracted watching Ursula Andres emerging from the sea on Super 8 and polishing their silencers it would appear that the sacred pillars of freedom and democracy have been crumbling beneath our feet.

The Times report that in 2007 Jonathan Evans, the MI5 Director-General, alerted 300 British businesses that they were under Chinese cyber-attack and British intelligence chiefs have supposedly warned recently of Britain’s vulnerability to crippling cyber attacks on telecoms and utilities. They even went the extra alarmist mile and named names suggesting that equipment installed by Chinese Telecoms giant Huawei, in BT’s new communications network, could be used to halt services critical to the UKs infrastructure such as power, food and water supplies.

In a sort of denial of any form of cyber skulduggery, a spokesman from the Chinese embassy in London, Liu Weimin stressed that, "it is against the law to hack into the computers of others.’ Quite what the law has to do with China’s, or any other regime’s efforts to infiltrate, monitor and control the computer systems of other nations is less than clear. Getting caught seems to be the main issue.