I'm always stunned to read about "researchers" discovering and demonstrating attacks and security flaws that not only have long existed in the wild but that are in fact very commonly found on computers. This particular one hit me years ago and I've since seen it all over the place. Similarly, there's a great hoohah about the supposedly innovative confickers worming around the web. Reading through the reports you wouldn't know the same techniques have been common (with more effort made at cross-platform and hardware-level exploitation) for at least four or five years. I just wonder how often these people look at actual systems to see whether they're compromised, as opposed to assuming they're okay. When I look at people's computers, they're essentially always polluted. The questions are only how bad and by whom.

When people first start taking seriously the spread of organized computer crime, by national and by private groups, it usually appears the Chinese are the root of all evil. Taking into account that China manufactures the overwhelming majority of computer systems and components only deepens this suspicion.

Only with deeper experience do we start to appreciate that China is an easy target and that it's in a lot of other people's interest to reinforce views of China as the world's cyberboogeyman. The Chinese do their share of espionage and they do sleazy things to their citizenry's traffic. But on both fronts they've taken their cues and lessons from the US, which has always had the most active and extensive national criminal espionage operations of any nation. Since the early days of the Cold War, the US has viewed technology as weaponry and has used new exports of technology as platforms for "intelligence" gathering. Even in the cancerous secrecy society Cold Warriors have created and lately expanded, its a matter of public record that the US is the leader in this field of belly-walking endeavor.

On the private side, the chief rival of the US in criminality is not China but tis old playmate from the last century, the USSR remnants. They're trying to rebuild their national sleaze capability, but the collapse has left a ton of ace engineers and programmers with lots of time to think of ways to screw around with networks. They've led the way in using the famously insecure networks of China as gateways to launch quasi-anonymized attacks. Now essentially everyone reroutes their traffic before sniffing, attacking, controlling, etc. It's a favored trick of all sorts of people up to no good to route through China, because no one believes a word the government there says on the subject. Really, the only people with any credibility on these questions of origin are independent researchers - and I don't count any Federal contractors in that group.