Militarisation of cyberspace: how the global power struggle moved online

Yet another article from the Guardian in their excellent series, Battle for the Internet.

Rise of cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure on both sides of Atlantic calls for creation of cyberweapons and new rules for use

By Nick Hopkins, guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 April 2012 15.00 BST

Jonathan Millican is a first-year university student from Harrogate in North Yorkshire. He says he doesn't think of himself as a "stereotypical geek", but having been crowned champion in Britain's Cyber Security Challenge, the 19-year-old is bound to take some stick from his undergraduate friends at Cambridge.

The competition is not well known, but it is well contested. About 4,000 people applied to take part this year, hundreds were seen by judges, and 30 were selected for the final in Bristol on 10 March.

After a day of fighting off hackers and identifying viruses in a series of simulations, Millican triumphed, giving him legitimate claim to be the brightest young computer whiz in the UK.

And though he may not recognise it yet, Millican has become a small player in a global game. There is a dotted line that links him to an ideological battle over the future of the internet, and the ways states will use it to prosecute conflicts in the 21st century.

The remaining cold war superpower, the United States, is slowly squaring up to the emerging behemoth, China, in a sphere in which Beijing has a distinct advantage: cyberspace.

Experts estimate China has as many "cyber jedis" as the US has engineers, and some of them, with backing from the state, have been systematically hacking into and stealing from governments and companies in the west, taking defence secrets, compromising computer systems, and scanning energy and water plants for potential vulnerabilities.

The scale of what has been going on is only now being recognised, and with a discernible sense of panic, the US and the UK are...

...the remainder of this article and other related stories can be found at CyberWar Central.