Cyber-war trends: good, bad, and scary

The attention paid to Chinese cyberwarfare may be increasing, and warnings of doomsday from the government correspond to the new attention, but a new report from Mandiant, the company hired by The New York Times to cleanse their servers after a Chinese attack, suggests that, at long last, private companies are beginning to devote the resources required to fend off these deaths by a thousand cuts.

In the past, embarrassment, risk aversion, and a sense that if a state does it, our state has to respond to it, has prevented the development of cyber-defense best practices, even for companies that control big systems that touch our lives daily. In 2011, only 6 percent of Mandiant clients discovered a cyber intrusion on their own. In 2012, 37 percent discovered the intrusion before Mandiant set up a wall around their systems. Mandiant also says that the average time of the attack is down by about 40 percent, suggesting that counter-measures work as a deterrent. Still, fully two-thirds of attacked companies were not aware of it until an external source like Mandiant informed them about it.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.