Modern Espionage

Spiegel Online provides some details on espionage detected in Germany, including the ‘Ghostnet’

German intelligence also detected a noticeable increase in cyber attacks before meetings between Merkel and the Dalai Lama. The hackers appear to be particularly interested in the Tibet issue. In January 2008, various German officials received an e-mail with an attached document titled: “Analysis of Chinese Government Policy Toward Tibet.” The sender was supposedly a Tibetan organization in the United States. A malicious program was hidden in the analysis.

The giant question, of course, is whether anyone can trace anything conclusively. Since plausible denial is so effective in the physical world, I suspect technology will generate the same results only faster. Sloppy work by the spies will lead to convictions, but otherwise there will be a tangled web of dead ends to sift through, creating demand for better correlation and monitoring tools.

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